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

[Richard Wraith <rgw@trinity.unimelb.edu.au>]

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

-- 
Dr Richard Wraith                             rgw@trinity.unimelb.edu.au
Director of IT & T and the Trinity Learning Innovation Centre
Trinity College   Royal Parade   Parkville   3052   Victoria   Australia
tel: +61-3-9348 7112      mobile: 0417 361 093      fax: +61-3-9348 7498

On Wed, 14 Apr 2004 daniel.hunt@iibbank.ie wrote:

> Date: Wed, 14 Apr 2004 13:46:44 +0100
> From: daniel.hunt@iibbank.ie
> Reply-To: schoolforge-discuss@schoolforge.net
> To: schoolforge-discuss@schoolforge.net
> Subject: RE: [school-discuss] LTSP First Time - why not net-boot?
>
> Well the specific reasons i'd have is gaming :o) if every hard drive has a
> copy of a certain network game for the users to play then it's simply a
> matter of the teacher running "enableLocalDisks.sh" wouldn't it? :o)
>
> I was hoping you'd say it was still the centrally controlled option ... I
> dont' think _I'd_ be comfy with admin'ing 45 machines and a server in Redhat
> let alone a LinuxBlind Teacher! :D
>
> I wonder if it would still be benificial to have the beast of a server
> though ...
>