Re: Hardware advice: seeking echoes of running Linux-PC clusters
> But the computer division is hostile to linux (that's why the demand came
> directly from the boss), so I'll have to face sharp critics. I guess the key
> argument against such an approach is the problems of maintaining a park of
> linux PC's: updates (like switching to 1.1...), back-ups, support, etc...
Of course, Debian is easy to upgrade. Maintaining a pack of Debian PCs
would mostly be a matter of NFS-exporting a Debian archive and running a
script on all the PCs (using rsh, maybe) to update packages regularly.
You'd have to use a system like YP (NIS, I think we call it now...) to
distribute usernames and passwords, but that shouldn't be too hard to set up.
An alternative is to make the PCs diskless (or nearly diskless - /tmp and
swap on local disk) workstations and administer the installed packages
centrally. This will probably make things a little slower - but for email,
TeX, and so on it shouldn't really matter. It should make administration
considerably easier, and avoid the chance of individual systems getting
messed up by user stupidity.
Steve Early
sde1000@cam.ac.uk
PS. I'm a BOFH at heart, really. I like the second solution.
Reply to: