RE: [school-discuss] LTSP First Time - why not net-boot?

[daniel.hunt@iibbank.ie]

Well I'm currently looking into it ... but I'd still sway towards a beast of
a server. There's only going to be one server, so I'd rather it out
performed it's requirements than it proved to be about as useful to the
school as a bowl of custard.

I'd possibly consider downgrading it to a single processor, possibly and AMD
(maybe an A64 for the extra "ummph") and that would definitely free up some
cash for the network modifications.

As it stands there are currently two 24port switches on the network - one is
all 100Lan and the other is all 10Lan (the machines are capable of 100, but
the switch is useless)

It would make sense to have the one copy of the games remotely on the
server, but as soon as 4/5 people start playing the network could well slow
to a crawl as it transfers the 3/400 megs required for the game to play. not
to mention the RAM in the clients would have to be able to hold it all ...
so I could be looking at upping the clients to a gig of RAM each?

Plus, it's very likely that there'll be some multimedia elements used ... I
can't be certain, but I can't leave them with no choice but not to use it
you know?

Daniel


-----Original Message-----
From: Richard Wraith [mailto:rgw@trinity.unimelb.edu.au]
Sent: 15 April 2004 01:14
To: schoolforge-discuss@schoolforge.net
Subject: RE: [school-discuss] LTSP First Time - why not net-boot?


Daniel,

It is pretty clear that LTSP is not going to meet the gaming requirement
for your lab. Multimedia stuff, particularly games, will really kill an
LTSP server and the user experience won't be a contented one.

On the other hand net-booting will do it nicely - as long as you have
sufficient RAM in the clients, at least 256MB and more if you can manage
it.

As I said before there is no need for a local HD, even to run the games.
In fact it is better not to. The games should be in a directory on the
server that is NFS mounted on the clients. The teacher can then just
change the permissions on the games directory when she/he wants to
enable/disable access to the games in class. You could simplify the
permissions change with a little script.

As for the server, you won't need a beast for net-booting though it might
be useful for it to have up to a GB of RAM and with 45 clients it might
be helpful to have a GB interface to your network. If you could get or
have access to a single 48 port or two stacked 24 port switches with a
least one GB port on it you would have a rather nice setup. So rather than
spend your money on the sever spend it on your network switches and RAM
for your clients.

If you don't need the gaming (and for that matter demanding multimedia)
requirement then LTSP or net-booting will both be fine.

Cheers,

Richard


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