A lab of FreeBSD machines for a nonprofit computer class/club for kids
I'm involved with a kids computer class/club, introducing interested children to Free and Open Source Software and good computing habits. One project is to build a lab of freebsd machines on some donated sparc64 architecture machines.
The intention is to make a partial local mirror of ftp.freebsd.org available over nfs and create a dhcp/pxe/tftp infrastructure to allow a series of clients to install themselves as usable graphical desktops.
Technical Challenges:- The network is mostly disconnected from the Internet and even when it is connected, it's not much better than a flaky dialup connection from yesteryear.
- Disk space.
- Building ports on these machines for desktop environments takes a good long while.