Re: Debian based remote office support
On Thu, 2005-03-31 at 18:02 +0200, Simon Tennant wrote:
> 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
> --------
Are these net-booted diskless clients? If so I recommend having a look
at lessdisks (in sarge), as it has a nice Debian chroot for upgrading
the clients shared NFS root. Other alternatives like LTSP may be more
polished, but are effectively their own distro inside the NFS root,
making you tied to their updates, rather than Debian's.
If not I suggest thinking about it... having to maintain lots of clients
is a pain. If they really want it, I'd suggest putting HDD's in cradles,
and they can choose at boot time to boot of the HDD or of the network...
I bet they end up rarely booting of the HDD, especially if the HDD's are
their own responsibilty and they regularly screw them up.
> 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?
afs? coda?
coda is "newer" (ie better design but less tested), afs is "older" (ie,
a bit clunky but well tested). Coda was developed to be a free
alternative to afs... then afs became open source. Since afs became
free, I dunno what has happened with Coda, but it was working pretty
well last time I looked.
> 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.
I must learn to read ahead before replying :-)
> 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?
email is fine... just use IMAP clients.
file sharing is trickier.
--
Donovan Baarda <abo@minkirri.apana.org.au>
http://minkirri.apana.org.au/~abo/
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