[K12OSN] New Building's LTSP Server

[Joseph Bishay]

Hello,


On Mon, Apr 18, 2011 at 9:30 AM, Jeff Siddall <news at siddall.name> wrote:
> Personal opinions:
>
> You are definitely going to need more than 2 GB RAM.  CPU seems less
> important.  I am running a quad core Phenom II, 8 GB with about 20
> clients total, 10 or so being steadily used.

Is there a link to your specific type of machine so I can learn more
about pricing / specs?

>  No performance issues
> except it is easy for the GigE to get saturated if there are clients
> playing video.  Video is killer for LTSP.  If you don't install flash
> your life will be better :)

Unfortunately as this is an elementary school, as much as I'd love to
not have flash, I know it will be 100% required :)

> I would avoid SCSI drives.  Not because they are bad, but because your
> money could probably be better spent elsewhere.  Modern SATA drives
> perform great.  Also, definitely go with RAID1.  Not only will it buy
> you survivability but you get 2X the read performance.  Software raid
> works fine.  Avoid RAID5.  If you can afford it try SSDs.  They will
> vastly increase the random IO ability of your system which is especially
> important for LTSP.

Would you say that the much higher cost of SSD  and their read/write
lifespan limits are still better than SCSI?

I've been running RAID1 so I'd continue to do that for sure.

> You might be better off building two
> smaller servers for the same price.  You might also run into scaling
> issues with file handles and whatnot with a large number of logged-in
> clients.  Google for people who ran into that and the resolution they
> found.

I have been thinking about this but this would be entirely new for me
so I'm a bit hesitant.  I also need to be able to sync the /home
directories of a small sub-set of users when they log out with another
remote server so I'm not sure if one location has a all-in-one LTSP
server and the other has a different multi-server configuration if it
will easily work or not.

> Localapps for pig apps like Firefox may help save your server performance.

This may be the cleanest solution as 90% of the time people will be
running Firefox.

> Good luck.  Please post your findings once you get things up and running.

Will do!
Joseph