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 sizedoffices (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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