Technical Products

CK:P is producing a scalable networked environment suitable for serving dozens of schools, hundreds of teachers and thousands of students with a high reliability, low cost and moderate maintenance requirements. This environment includes network information servers, client user devices and network infrastructure. Specific hardware products currently under development are as follows:

CK:P Servers. Network information servers are currently implemented on a variety of Unix platforms, with the ability for common source maintenance, local user administration and remote system administration. The servers consist of a platform dependent software package along with a platform independant software package.
Client Setup. CK:P clients (user devices) are either Windows PC's or Apple Macintoshes. These machines are configured with a variety of network applications, drawn primarily from the public domain. Three grades of client devices exist:
- Low End User Device: based on a 486 PC platform
- Multi-Media Device: a MAC based or a 486 PC based platform which supports both images and sound.
- Web Foundry Machine: a graphics machine which based on a PowerMac or Pentium PC.
Automated setup procedures provide the ability to rapidly install new user devices, upgrade existing user devices or restore the system on corrupted machines. This process can be accomplished using a locally available server or over a remote server connected via a dedicated network connection.
Network Architecture. A network hierarchy of school-based Local Area Networks, a city-wide Metropolitan Area Network and the Wide Area Networking capabilities of the global Internet provide teachers and students with access to a wide range of online resources and allow them to present their work to a world-wide audience.

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