Re: RH to Debian migration
On Wed, 30 Jul 2003 01:40:08 +0200, Roberto Sanchez wrote:
> Greetings list,
>
> I have recently taken over as the admin of a small lab at school. The
> current admin has graduated and gone off to grad school and today we
> spent the day going
> over the lab setup. Anyhow, the point is that I don't particularly care
> for the current setup (10 machines running RH 9) because of the kludges
> he has set up:
>
> -Remote updating is a real pain (I know there are command line tools for
> this in RH, but it seems like a real pain) -The lab director does not
> want to pay for support or for RH Enterprise Workstation, so they setup
> one RHN account, added all 10 machines and then rotate the demo
> entitlement amongst them to be able to run up2date for each one.
>
> The machines are:
> 1 fileserver (2x80GB RAID-0) houses user home directories, is the print
> server
Using RAID0 for a fileserver like this is very inefficient. If users open
a small file, both disks have to read a part of the file. I'd recommend
you to make 2 independent disks, each for some home directories. RAID0 is
only an advantage if you need really fast sequential file access. As all
data will be transfered via network, the speed of one disk will be enough.
Furthermore, a disk failure won't destroy all data.
> 1 firewall/web/email server runs Apache, PHP, MySQL, Horde
The firewall should be on a seperate machine. If this isn't possible, you
might consider putting everything but the firewall to a vserver or UML.
This gives you the advantage that in case a cracker breaks into the
web/email/mysql server, he can't stop the firewall.
> 8 workstations running StarOffice 6.0 (university has a site license)
> and VMWare workstation (currently 3.2 but soon 4.0)
>
> The 8 workstations shouldn't pose a real challenge, but any
> recommendations would be appreciated.
Maybe you should consider mounting the workstations root directory via
NFS. As they should run the same software, it will make them more easy to
administer. They can be booted by a bootable CDROM/floppy and an initrd.
> The real challenge is the web and
> fileservers becuase they are both setup to only allow root to log in and
> they run X, which to me poses a major risk.
Install a debian woody system without X on the servers.
> I would like to transition
> all the machines over Debian (Sid for the 8 workstations and Woody for
> the two servers) while preserving the user home directories.
I'd recommend a mixed system sarge/sid for the workstations.
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