From: David Garrett List Editor: David Garrett Editor's Subject: Re: Appleshare v. Waterloo MacJanet Author's Subject: Re: Appleshare v. Waterloo MacJanet Date Written: Thu, 27 Apr 1995 11:09:59 EDT Date Posted: Fri, 27 Apr 1995 11:09:59 -0400 JT> We are a middle school of 700 students and we are currently using JT> Waterloo MacJanet for student disk spaces on our Macintosh network. JT> While MacJanet has many advantages, we are considering moving to JT> Appleshare for student disks. Does anyone have any experience with JT> doing this and if so, what are some of the problems and successes JT> with having students use Appleshare for their local disk spaces. We are still using Waterloo MacJanet (have been for about four years), and plan to continue using it. We are using AppleShare for our administrative file server, but I much prefer Waterloo MacJanet for the students. Advantages off the top of my head: 1. It is very easy to add, remove and modify users from the system - much easier (make that MUCH easier) than the same for AppleShare. 2. A student cannot "forget" their network disk at home. They can forget their password, but that is easy to get. They can forget their AppleShare password, but without third party thingys it is much more difficult to retrieve a student's password from AppleShare than MacJanet. 3. I like the ability to control access to laser printers. Our new school (opened Sept. 94) has only LaserWriters, which give excellent results, but cost more than dot matrix to operate. With Janet we can limit the number of pages a student can print. AppleShare also has a print spooler, which forces users to log on to print, but it cannot limit the number of pages a user can print. It can tell you how many pages they have printed, but cannot set an upper limit. We charge our students 5 cents per page to print, they buy them in bunches of 20 from the school bookstore. It is reasonably easy to adjust a student's number of pages as they buy, and it keeps costs under control. 4. An advantage and disadvantage of AppleShare over MacJanet is that with MacJanet you set a fixed size for student network disks, and they cannot fill it any more than that size. With AppleShare, a student's "network disk" is really a folder on the server. Thus the only limit to the amount of data they can store is set by the limit of the hard drive the folder sits on. There are times when an essentially open ended size is good, but students tend to fill until it is full. A limit forces them to allocate their disk space with some thought. Hope this helps. Dave --------------------------------------------- David Garrett Physics Teacher/Network Manager Morinville Community High School Morinville, Alberta Canada Phone: (403) 939-6891 Fax: (403) 939-6896 email: dgarrett@freenet.edmonton.ab.ca