[K12OSN] Servers, K12LTSP, and workstation numbers, etc.

[Les Mikesell]

On Mon, 2006-07-24 at 10:15 -0500, Doug Simpson wrote:

> But when I read articles that say a district has 32 servers to deploy 
> K12LTSP, I am thninking I am missing something because where is the cost 
> savings in that, forst of all, and that means server updates and 
> everything will have to be done on all those servers.

Assuming you have central LDAP authentication and common NFS home
directories all of the other servers can be identical clones
either with disk image copies or an automated kickstart install.
Subsequent maintenance until the next complete install consists
of occasional 'yum update' commands which can be done remotely
over ssh or automated.

> Our Supt. is a "Bottom Dollar" kind of guy and he doesn't look at TCO so 
> much as what it will cost to "get it in the door".

If you are used to OS's that take a lot of babysitting, this is
different.
Putting everything in one big box isn't going to save that much compared
to distributing the load intelligently. 

> Say I have a server with 12GB RAM, Almost a terabyte (sp?) of SCSI hard 
> drive in Raid5 and Gigabit NICs.  Realistically, how many workstations can 
> I hang off there using Gnome, Mozilla, OOo, and several other apps on 
> intermittent basis and see usable performance?

The network will be the likely bottleneck here.  But a box like this
would
make a good authentication and home directory server along with being
able to run a roomful of terminals.  

> Also, I have one server, running FC1 with K12LTSP and it serves DHCP IP 
> addresses, but I want another server to handle the terminals.
> 
> I added the next-server line to dhcpd.conf, but it still looks to the FC1 
> server to boot from. The other (preferred server) is FC3, K12LTSP and I 
> think it is set up correctly.

Is this on a flat network with one NIC?  You need to set
option root-path to the desired server as well.  Note that you can
tie these to subnet or host scopes to distribute the load.  If
you do end up with everything on one big server you can put
multiple NICs on different subnets to split the network load.

-- 
  Les Mikesell
   les at futuresource.com