[K12OSN] 2-server setup

[Burke Almquist]

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On Jan 31, 2007, at 10:46 AM, Krsnendu dasa wrote:
> We are on a tight budget, so I have tried to do the best I can at  low
> cost. I have currently setup 2 k12ltsp servers on 2 identical desktop
> machines. AMD 2500XP with 2GB RAM each. Each has a 120GB SATA hard
> drive and gigabit network.
> 1:  RAID 1 Complete K12LTSP including hosting NFS /home
> 2: Complete K12LTSP on one drive and a second 250GB drive for  
> BackupPC.
>
> I now have a spare 1.2GHZ AMD computer. Would it be worth putting an
> SATA2 raid card into that and hosting /home and LDAP there? How good
> it SATA2 with NCQ? Or is it absolutely essential to go for (way more
> expensive) SCSI hard drives?
That's probably enough CPU if you are using REAL hardware RAID. I'd  
want a gig of RAM to start with room to double if you need more clients.
NCQ is pretty good on the newer SATA drives. The downside to IDE/SATA  
drives is the lower speed motors, having a single head for read and  
write,  and lower QC for consumer drives. A good compromise would be  
the SATA Raptor drives. They are 10k RPM drives that are designed for  
server use. It's almost like a 10k SCSI drive using a SATA connector.  
Of course they have a cost between that of real SCSI and desktop SATA  
drives too.


>
> How much CPU power would I need for an LDAP /home host for 27 clients?
> Is 1.2 GHZ enough? And how much RAM? I know that BackupPC (rsync) uses
> a bit of cpu power, but because this machine would back up at night I
> guess it wouldn't matter much.

If you have the bandwidth, I'd take the 250 GB drive home and run  
BackupPC from there. That way your backups are offsite. Of you can  
put it on a fat client in a different area of the building. The  
advantage of this setup is that you really only need to backup the  
rig doing NFS and LDAP regularly. The only stuff worth backing up on  
the LTSP servers is the configuration data, if you made many  
customizations. That doesn't change much, so you can burn a restore  
disk of sorts for those, once you get them setup.

>
> Thanks.
> Krsnendu dasa
>
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