Rachel Plus 3.0 vs OER2GO

Content
#1

My name is Christina and I am an IT intern for Austin Pathways for the Housing Authority of the city of Austin.

Background: We rebuild and reimage donated devices and donate them to participants in public housing. We currently: a) reimage Dell 780’s, 790’s and 1080’s with Ubuntu using a CD and add Rachel using a USB, b) install Rachel on Apple laptops. We do this because so many of our low-income residents do not have internet at home. The content is perfect for our residents.

The problem: To reimage each machine with a CD and USB currently takes us about 30 to 40 minutes per machine. Reimaging devices is limited by the number of physical sets of CDs and USBs. We currently have 200+ devices and are expecting another large donation soon.

Our goal is to reduce the amount of time it takes to reimage, and reduce our dependence on USBs to install Rachel.

Possible Solutions?
I have a few questions to ask as well as welcoming any recommendations you may have.

We want to install several content on several individual devices at the same time. My understanding is that all OER2GO content on the Rachel Plus 3.0. Would Rachel - Plus 3.0 be an efficient way to do that?

Are you able to install Rachel Plus 3.0 content on devices when connected?
Our version of Rachel is 32Gbps. It looks like OER2GO is 300Gbps. Is that correct? What is the file size of that content zipped?
Has anyone tried to use a USB drive to transfer 300Gbps? Is that advisable?
Rachel Plus 3.0 seems to have a lot more content than the old Rachel.

OER2GO:
How much space would be needed to download to a USB drive?
How do you access OER2GO to be able to download?
Is OER2GO available in a zip file? Or only downloadable by each module?
Does OER2Go contain the same content as Rachel?
What is the best way to download the content without accidentally corrupting it?
I would also like to inform you that I have come across a few errors when accessing the website in case you are unaware. I am not sure if it is just my access to this.

Thank You,
Christina

1 Like
#2

Hi Cristina,
Since no one else has answered you, I will jump in. The Rachel Plus devices are not really intended for file serving or copying of content to another device. They are designed to serve preloaded content to attached “client” devices over the local network (wireless or wired). While it would be possible to copy much of the OER2GO content to another device using Linux commands, in my opinion you would be better off downloading desired content to one of your laptops directly from the OE websites or flash drive and then configure the user interface to meet your needs.
After you have set up one laptop to meet your needs, you could use “CloneZilla” or similar program to capture an “image” of that machine’s drive. Then you could set up an imaging server on a local network, and either network boot new laptops to it or else use USB sticks to boot into Clonezilla and download a copy of the image to each other machine. It would run much faster than manually copying content files from a USB drive or CD even if you can’t network boot them and have to use individual USB boot devices to get them started. You could have multiple machines downloading the image from the server at once, limited only by your local network bandwidth and server capacity. Of course, you’ll need to find someone tech savy to set this up for you. I’ve been cloning laptops for schools in Africa for years and have used the individual USB Clonezilla boot drives and portable USB hard drives to hold the image master, and it takes 15-20 minutes for typical size image (depends on your hardware and how large your image file is). I didn’t have as large quantity at once to image as you apparently do, so I never set up a network image server.
Perhaps someone else will see this and jump in with some other ideas, but this may help you in mean time.
Regards.

1 Like
#3

Dr. Leon,
Thank you for your suggestions
Regards