[K12OSN] LTSP on Sparc

[Terrell Prude', Jr.]

Hello Norbert,

Personally, I'd advise against making LTSP servers out of those SPARC 
workstations unless they're very beefy w/ lots of DRAM.  I have an Ultra 
5 here at home, and those boxes topped out at 512MB DRAM and 440MHz 
CPUs--not LTSP server material, unfortunately, unless you have one 
client.  :-)

An example of good LTSP server hardware from Sun might be a Sun Blade 
2000 or 2500 machine w/ two 1-1.28GHz CPUs and 4GB DRAM.  Mind you that 
if you do want to do this, you're looking at about $10,500.  For that 
much money, though, you could build five dual-Athlon systems, each with 
4GB DRAM and *fiber* Gig-E.  Heck, you could build three dual-Opteron 
boxes for that much and go 64-bit.  Even if you go with a Sun Fire V210, 
a 1U rack-mount server box, with similar specs as the above, you're 
looking at about $7000.  Remember also that with Sun boxes, especially 
the newer ones, you'd have to deal with making sure that GNU/Linux for 
the SPARC64 will actually play nicely with all that proprietary hardware.

On the other hand, LTSP *clients* have been made out of SPARC and 
UltraSPARC boxes, and I've heard that they work pretty well (I myself 
haven't yet tried it).

--TP

norbert wrote:

> Hi,
>
> There was a post for a "Step-by-step Howto" install and setup LTSP on 
> Sparc (Solaris), does anyone still have a working link to it ?
> Our school has a number of Sparc workstations and Ultrasparc that I 
> would like to turn into LTSP servers, does anyone have a working 
> system(s) and could we get some feedback?
>
> Thank you
>
> norbert