Debian based remote office support

[Simon Tennant <simon@imaginator.com>]

I have been following this list for the last 4 years and am a keen
Debian user.  Now I am planning on setting up a business that will
provide a linux based office infrastructure to small - medium sized
offices (10-100 workstations).  I am hoping that some people 
can pick holes in this architecture before I start building it.

The general idea is to offer office users a subscription based
computing services.  The office users are presented with a net-booted
and diskless client.  Remote users are presented with a Knoppix
CD that creates a tunnel back to the datacenter infrastructure.
The net-boot and diskless images contain a Debian build including
Office utilities, mail and web software.  Perhaps will also include
VMWare software for those that need to run legacy applications.

Here's a diagram of the intended network.

________
|      |  Multiple client PCs booted off the network
--------
   | <-- 10/100 LAN network
   |
--------
|       |  one remote office server per site
|       |  office server (runs netboot services / LDAP slave /
|       |  firewall / router / printing / voip gateway...)
--------
   | <-- ADSL / SDSL / T1 or VPN on existing network
   |     (all connections VPN'd to Datacenter)
________
|       |  Datacenter running customised services for each office.
--------   (email, proxy, file sharing, LDAP master, SIP termination)
   | 
   | <-- outbound internet connection
   |



I would like to come up with a solution whereby all critical data is 
housed in a data-centre and each office we deploy to is "dumb".  If the 
office server dies, gets stolen, whatever we just stick a new one
in and Bob's your uncle.  I can set-up email, proxy, Kerberos and
LDAP to all connect back to a data-centre, but, how do I make the
file-sharing work well across wan links?

I would like to cache the files nearer the user while they work on
them but always fall back to a data-centre copy.  Is AFS the solution
for this?  From what I can tell OpenAFS is not working that well with
the 2.6 kernel tree.

What is the rest of the groups feeling about running services like
file-sharing and email across somewhat unreliable networks and how did
you get around these problems?

--
Simon Tennant ________________ http://imaginator.com/~simon/contact

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