This has been an interesting thread. It makes me want to raise my own question. Is it possible to do multi-server/single source authenticaton using Active Directory rather than LDAP? Right now, we're not able to drop active directory for students, but will probably need to add servers as our LTSP experiment moves forward. The sticking point has been the way winbind/samba creates and maps unix passwords to windows passwords. Essentially each installation of Linux that uses Active Directory for authenticaton ends up with their own local user/pass db that makes centralized NFS homes semi-impossible. Has anyone figured out how to scale Linux and AD? John <div>On 1/26/07, Burke Almquist <<a href="mailto:balmquist@mindfirestudios.com">balmquist@mindfirestudios.com</a>> wrote:<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 For installations that need 3 or more servers, I'd have one server with SCSI drives that has /home exported over NFS and centralized login and a different LTSP servers for each area. This makes backup easier (all the important data is on the one server) and it also allows you to put cheep disks on your LTSP servers. Put the expensive SCSI RAID all on the one server that does NFS and login(with redundant power supplies, UPS, etc). This lets you build relatively cheep LTSP servers using dual core CPUS with lots of RAM and cheep low capacity IDE drives. All the servers should use gigabit ethernet though. Two servers seems to be a bad number. I'd either try to keep it all on one server, or divorce your /home and LDAP server from your LTSP servers. On Jan 26, 2007, at 10:54 AM, Joseph Bishay wrote: > Hello, > > Thanks once again for all the insight! I'm going to be going back to > the building committee with much of this in mind. > > I'm hoping this isn't a very silly question, but I am a bit confused. > > I have a question about the MDF and the IDFs -- where all the network > cabling will be running back to. Now I know from various setups I've > seen that often where all these cables terminate there is a rack with > the hardware that connects to the switches and the patch panel. In > our case while we will have a patch panel where the various Cat6 > cables will come in and terminate. Assuming 4+ drops / room, we'll > have many, many terminations. Now, due to the cost of rack-mounted > equipment, and what we can afford/is donated to us, it is nearly 99% > sure we won't have rack mounted units for the servers. Is this not a > problem if they can't fit into that distribution centre (which seems > to be not much larger than a big closet)? Is there a problem to have > the servers (full size towers) in another room in the building and > running cables to the distribution centre? Or will there be some sort > of bottleneck? > > My apologies if this is an obvious thing. > > The second question relates to the server setup. Currently we have 12 > computers running on 1 server. In the future building would it be > better to set up different k12ltsp servers serving up everything (IE: > clones) spread around the building (IE: 1 for school, 1 for daycare, 1 > for youth lounge) or would it be better to have 1 k12ltsp server for > the whole building, 1 for NFS mount /home, 1 application server for > the whole building,etc. > > Looking forward to your answer > Joseph > > _______________________________________________ > K12OSN mailing list > <a href="mailto:K12OSN@redhat.com">K12OSN@redhat.com</a> > <a href="https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/k12osn">https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/k12osn</a> > For more info see < <a href="http://www.k12os.org">http://www.k12os.org</a>> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.5 (Darwin) iEYEARECAAYFAkW6TsEACgkQfqZR3ThMfXTfcwCfbhH4b08uZn4Kqg76kZwpHslG rgQAn1LWlw/IHQJL82aycNN3QmIauo41 =7Wpd -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- _______________________________________________ K12OSN mailing list <a href="mailto:K12OSN@redhat.com">K12OSN@redhat.com</a> <a href="https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/k12osn"> https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/k12osn</a> For more info see <<a href="http://www.k12os.org">http://www.k12os.org</a>> </blockquote></div>