[K12OSN] PD for staff

[Les Mikesell]

On Fri, 2004-04-16 at 23:25, Andrew Fournier wrote:
> This would seem to imply that large central ( or clustered?) application
> and home servers connected to from lab and classroom level ltsp servers
> would be what is wanted for a building wide implementation, right? This
> kinda brings up kimberlite & LVM for the home server.....

Having a central authentication server and home directories makes
sense, but whether you should offload apps from the local
desktop servers or not is a trade-off that is going to depend
on local circumstances.  You will gain some efficiency by
running more copies of the same app on the same machine where
linux will share the memory, and perhaps some stability because
upgrades may be done separately on these machines.  However
you now have to maintain custom menus and machines that
are not all identical clones. You also may need a more expensive
network backbone to match the performance of a classroom
server with a gigabit uplink to a classroom switch behind the
local server.  A compromise might be to start with a 'staff'
application server where you maintain programs not needed
in every classroom but run all the student desktops and apps
from identical/interchangeable local servers.

---
  Les Mikesell
   les at futuresource.com