[K12OSN] Planning for Next Year

[Brian Chivers]

Mark Cockrell wrote:
> Hello all,
>     I'm putting together my summer to-do list and I plan to do some
> serious re-organization of my current server setup.  I'm hoping some
> of those here more experience with Linux can help me out.  I have a
> Windows NT domain with approximately 700 users on about 400 PCs.  I
> want to move my PDC to a Samba/LDAP server and let my Win 2K/XP
> machines authenticate to that.  I have a server I've been using as my
> K12LTSP server.  It's a one-NIC setup supporting about 50 clients,
> though rarely more than 20 at any one time.  It's a dual Xeon 2.4GHz
> with 4GB RAM and an SATA RAID array for storage.  My question is
> this:  Could this machine serve has both my K12LTSP server AND my
> Samba/LDAP server?  Could this hardware handle the user
> authentication and the accompanying file management and still be an
> effective thin-client server?  Our high school students in particular
> make extensive use of the network storage and frequently move large
> files across the network.  What would be the most likely bottleneck
> here?  Is this too much to ask of a single server?  Are my specs. too
> meager?  Would I be able to achieve seamless integration of Windows
> and Linux logons with this setup?  Would I have to share the user
> directory via both Samba and NFS to do so?  Any wisdom would be
> appreciated.

I'm planning a similar move this summer. At the moment we have a dual Xeon
2.8 with 1Gb of RAM running RH9 / Samba 2.x acting as a NT4 PDC. It handles
over 1000 students on 500 machine without any complaints.

I've just order a Dual Xeon 3 Ghz with 1Gb of RAM to run Samba 3 / OpenLDAP
so the Win2k/XP side of things shouldn't be a problem with the spec you've
mentioned. I can't talk about the LTSP side of things.

We have things like shared areas stored on another server again running rh9
with Samba and this authenticates to the main samba box. We then just map
the relevent drives as they login via a Kixstart script.

Brian Chivers
Portsmouth College


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    The views expressed here are my own and not necessarily 
                the views of Portsmouth College