Guys,

I wanted to get your opinions on such a set-up:

volunteering to give IT lessons in a fairly disadvantaged school - no network to speak of, one weak ADSL line for the whole school and ancient PCs. So I figured I'd be bringing my laptop that could act as a server for the class (DHCP, Samba, identity and other usual stuff) but more importantly act as a BigBlueButton server as I have some volunteers to teach remotely.

What I'm not sure about - will the laptop overheat if 30 students start accessing a video stream, hitting the database server and whatever else they could tax the machine with during lessons? Will the experience be unbearably slow?

Specs: 4GB RAM, Dual-Core 2.10GHz 2 year-old Inspiron

I'd be very grateful for any feedback

Bandwidth will be a big issue, you can check the FAQs, on bigbluebutton.org, but each video cam, and any deskshare sessions will need to be transmitted to each student. You will need plenty of UPLOAD and DOWNLOAD bandwidth for it to work.

Also, audio with 15-20 users will consume abut 80% of your LAPTOP CPU, and quality of voice will be affected above that number.

regards,
Stephen

Thanks Stephen,

Actually I'm taking it into the class specifically to solve the bandwidth issue as then we have the "server" on LAN and only a teacher has to remote in.

When you say "15-20" for audio transmission, do you mean a simultaneous audio chat with 15-20 students, i.e. two-way conversation between a teacher and 15-20 students? Or are you referring tp just one-way transmission of teacher's audio to 15-20 students that will hit the CPU?