[K12OSN] Large scale implementation in the pipe, input needed.

[Daniel Hedblom]

Hi!

At the school district im an admin at there are talks about implementing a
large scale k12 LTSP solution. We have been testing succesfully on one
school but only with about 15 clients. The latest bid is to have one big
central server. It will be serving a cuple of other schools over 1 gbit
fiber connections. An estimate over the number of clients would be about
50-60 at two schools and maybe 40 additional from other smaller schools
and locations.

I have been pondering this quite a bit and im a bit concerned about the
cost of the server and backbones etc. Since other traffic flows in the
same fibers there will have to be some kind of vlan separating the traffic
since passwords etc flows unencrypted between client/server. I really
would appriciate input on this since i have a thing for linux and wouldnt
want an implementation to go wrong at my own turf. Is a central server a
good solution or is the benefit smaller than percieved? Have anyone done
this in a grand scale and what was the pitfalls in those cases?

Im perticulary interested in how scaling have been solved on big sites.
Have tried an openmosix cluster but the benefit was small since we dont
run any cpu intensive applications.

In short, is it a good solution to get a big iron hosting everything
instead of spreading several smaller Terminal Servers onsite and just
centralize /home and logins?

All inputs are appriciated.

Cheers!

/daniel