[K12OSN] network design

[Rita Gibson]

Terrell Prudé, Jr. wrote:

> Paul Satherley wrote:
>
>> Sharon Betts wrote:
>>
>>> Hello everyone -- can I get a discussion going to help me sort out my
>>> plans?
>>>
>>> I would like some input on my network design.  I have 4 schools and a
>>> business office; 3000 users; and over 1000 machines (growing by 
>>> leaps and
>>>  
>>>
>> LTSP scales to 30 thin-clients per 4G ram and a dual Cpu box..with 
>> that in mind.
>>
>
> That depends on what desktop you have people using, which apps they're 
> expected to run, etc.  For either GNOME or KDE with OpenOffice.org and 
> Firefox/Thunderbird (or traditional Mozilla), I'd say between 30 and 
> 40 thin clients is the max.  My dual-proc server with 4GB DRAM handles 
> 25 today and has enough room for another roughly 15 before swapping 
> starts taking place.  My kids run their choice of GNOME or KDE.
>
> On the other hand, if you have the users running, say, IceWM or XFce, 
> you could probably put more than 40 users on.  If you're talking apps 
> with few screen updates like OO.o and Moz/Firefox/Tbird, go for it.  
> If you have a bunch of people running, say, TuxType, which is known 
> for large amounts of screen updates, then network bandwidth becomes 
> the bottleneck.  Even a Gig-E card can keep up with only 14 people 
> playing TuxType at 1024x768x24bit.  That number may rise at lower 
> resolutions; I would expect it to.  In the TuxType situation, you'd 
> want to use two Gig-E NICs in your server, ganged together in what 
> Cisco parlance calls an "EtherChannel" (I think the official term is 
> "multilink").  Then you can get as many as 28 TuxType users.

Eli:

I need to find out how to do this! I think we have one more gigabit port 
to the lab switches.....

Rita