Re: Setting up a bunch of boxen at a small school.
On Mon, Sep 24, 2001 at 02:50:32AM +0200, oivvio polite wrote:
|
| I might soon have to set up some 20 - 30 boxes supporting some 200 students.
| They'll want to do word processing, browse the web, read mail.
Web and mail work great with Linux, but as the previous poster said
word processing is a different story. I am getting into LaTeX myself,
but I would be surprised if the 200 students at that school are
actually interested in learning it.
| Of course any user should be able to log into his/her account from any box.
| What are my options here? Have all applications run from a powerful server
| and use boxen as X-terminals, run applications on boxen and store only home
| dirs on server...
|
| I'm looking for a setup that's easy to admin remotely and involves zero
| fiddling with the individual boxen.
You could have the clients be diskless X terms. This would reduce
maintenance to just one machine. The downside is the load it puts on
the server. With the X-terms you can run X clients locally or on the
server. If you have high-end pentiums or better (with memory) I think
running apps locally would be best. You will certainly want several
fast SCSI disks in the server because they will get all the load.
An alternative is to have each machine standalone, but with /home
mounted over NFS. You would need to do something about passwords too
(maybe NIS?). This has the advantage of reducing the load on the
server, however you now have 20-30 separate boxes to administrate. If
sshd is setup on them you can administrate remotely but it will have
lots of repetition. There are ways of syncing configs if they are all
identical though.
I think the diskless clients is the better setup because you get more
resource wastage if each system is standalone. Just think of any sort
of partitioning scheme (memory, disk blocks, etc) and you realize that
there is a certain amount of waste in every partition that is not
completely used. In addition the diskless clients can be lower
powered and still suffice. The reduced cost of low-power clients can
yield more available money to beef up the server with. You may want
more than one server though.
| All ideas are interesting but some ideas (that have actually been implemented
| and proven to work on a day-to-day basis) are more interesting.
I haven't actually implemented a network like that. I tried to setup
a diskless box but it can't mount it's root via NFS and I haven't
debugged it yet.
-D
Reply to: