server requirements

[Pete~C]

Hi

I am a VSO (Voluntary Service Overseas) volunteer in Nairobi with the
Kenya Society for the Blind and am collaborating on a project to
develop a small scale thin / low powered client server set up to
provide a portable resource for use in rural areas with perhaps one
server and five clients. The project blog is at www.ruralinternetkiosks.com/blog,
webanywhere sounds like a technology that would be worth exploring.
Until there is a great improvement in internet connectivity I do not
think that having each of the clients access a remote webanywhere
server would be a workable solution.

What I am interested in is the possibility of running a webanywhere
server on the local server which raises two questions. What server
specs would be needed to cope with five to ten clients and what
bandwidth and other requirements are we looking at for the server
connection to the internet?

Pete

[Wendy Chisholm]

Pete,

The rural internet kiosks project sounds wonderful. We would love to
help you investigate the possibility of hosting a local version of
WebAnywhere. Have you looked at the installation instructions at
http://code.google.com/p/webanywhere/wiki/Installation ? This
describes how to get a local copy up and running. Let us know if you
have any questions or need any clarifications.

Best,
--wendy

--
Wendy Chisholm
Web Accessibility Specialist
http://friendfeed.com/wendyc
http://staff.washington.edu/chiswa/
twitter: wendyabc

[Jeffrey Bigham]

To follow on to Wendy's response:

You can get everything set up on a relatively modest Linux machine
with free software.

The main components you need are Apache and the Festival speech
server. 5-10 clients is easy to handle and could probably be hosted
on a machine running other processes as well.

If you run your own server, the bandwidth to the Internet is just
whatever is required to download the content users are viewing.

Let us know if you have any other questions.

-Jeff

--
Jeffrey P. Bigham, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor, University of Rochester, Computer Science
Visiting Scientist, MIT CSAIL
http://www.jeffreybigham.com