[K12OSN] rolling your own

[Petre Scheie]

I think you mean $1500, not $15000. ;-)

William Fragakis wrote:
> A me, too. I think the budget for our new servers which are supposed to
> serve 60-100 are in the range you are talking about.
> 
> I built a dual core Pentium D 3.0 with 4 gb ram and 10K sata drives in a
> raid 1 for about $15000 last year. Overclocked to 3.3, it serves around
> 35 clients easily.
> 
> Actually, here's its current top readout during the school day. Don't
> worry about the uptime, we get frequent power outages because of storms.
> 
> top - 12:19:53 up 3 days,  2:32, 37 users,  load average: 0.06, 0.09,
> 0.25
> Tasks: 1084 total,   1 running, 1083 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
> Cpu(s):  0.3% us,  0.7% sy,  0.0% ni, 98.7% id,  0.0% wa,  0.0% hi,
> 0.3% si
> Mem:   3367028k total,  3030888k used,   336140k free,    79888k buffers
> Swap:  1933304k total,        0k used,  1933304k free,  1074252k cached
> 
> regards,
> William Fragakis
> morrisbrandon.com
> 
> On Fri, 2006-10-20 at 12:00 -0400, k12osn-request at redhat.com wrote:
>> ------------------------------
>>
>> Message: 18
>> Date: Fri, 20 Oct 2006 09:54:37 -0500
>> From: Petre Scheie <petre at maltzen.net>
>> Subject: Re: [K12OSN] rolling your own
>> To: "Support list for open source software in schools."
>>         <k12osn at redhat.com>
>> Message-ID: <4538E32D.9090509 at maltzen.net>
>> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
>>
>> I would argue your proposed machine is overkill for only 25 clients.
>> I think for 25 
>> clients one dual-core processor with 4GB, one gigabit NIC, and a RAID
>> of 10K RPM SCSI 
>> disks would be plenty. Such a configuration could probably support
>> 30-40 clients, 
>> depending on the apps being used.  I just went out to Dell and
>> configured a dual-core 
>> 2.8ghz Pentium, 4GB RAM, two 15KRPM 73GB disks in RAID1, and two
>> gigabit NICs for less 
>> than $2000.  And that includes a three year warranty.  If you've got a
>> $5000 budget, you 
>> could put the remaining funds toward servers & clients for other
>> classrooms.
>>
>> Petre
>>
>> Eric Brown wrote:
>>> My existing k12ltsp server isn't quite doing the job it used to.
>> It's
>>> a quad P3 550 MHz, with 3gb ram purchased off ebay 2 years ago.
>> When
>>> 20 kids open firefox and OO, things slow down quite a bit, and
>> firefox
>>> may hang on several kids.  I started searching for a new server on
>>> E-Bay, where I found a quad 2ghz machine with 8gb ram for $5k.  My
>>> principal was reluctant to spend that much money on something used
>>> with no warranty.  He said he'd prefer to have me purchase parts and
>>> use the assembly of the server as a teaching opportunity (something
>>> I've done with workstations in the past).
>>>
>>> My question for the group is, has anyone done this and encountered
>>> problems with some aspect of the machine in an LTSP environment?
>>>
>>> I'm looking at a Tyan board that will take 4 Opteron dual-core
>>> processors, probably 8 gb RAM, 2 gb nics onboard.  I'm not too
>> worried
>>> about disk space.  I've only got 4 9gb drives in a raid5 right now,
>>> and only 44% is in use for about 60 students.  I'm planning on
>>> something like 4 74gb 10,000 rpm drives with 8mb cache.  Since the
>>> board is an extended atx, nearly any case that will take it is
>> usually
>>> a server case with room for all the drives.
>>>
>>> Preliminary costs look to be $5k-$6k, which is the ball park I've
>> been 
>>> given.
>>>
>>> Anything I'm missing?  Is this a bad thing to do?  Shouldn't this
>> run
>>> 20-25 clients very well for some time?  Is it too much (I'm often
>>> accused of over-engineering anything I build)?  Any comments
>> welcome.
>>> Thanks,
>>> Eric Brown
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
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>>> K12OSN at redhat.com
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>>> For more info see <http://www.k12os.org>
>>>
>>
> 
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