[K12OSN] LTSP detailing required for Nepal

[Sudev Barar]

On 15/03/07, Peter Scheie <peter at scheie.homedns.org> wrote:
>
> Shishir Jha wrote:
> > I am from Kathmandu Nepal, and am currently studying as a fourth year
> > computer engineering student here. Last December as a holiday project we
> > tried out LTSP and after its amazing result we decided to deploy it one
> > of the remote areas of Nepal, Dang, which is some 450 km from our
> > capital Kathmandu.We teamed up with a NON-Government Organization Help
> > Nepal Network for financial and other support. We used K12LTSP 5.0 with
> > PIV Intel 865GSA 3,06 GHz, server in 10/100 mbps switch. Thin clients
> > were phased out PI's IBM 133Mhz with 32 mb RAM. Total no. of clients
> > running there  are 5. This project was acheived with minimal cost
> > expenditure of about 85,000 Nepali Rupee (1200$US) and has been
> > performing flawlessly ever since. More than 200 students take direct
> > advantage of this system in a place which could have been untouched by
> > computers if not for this initiative taken by Help Nepal and us.
> >
> > Now, after the immense success of that project, we and our parent NGO
> > are being approached by different organizations for mass deployment. We
> > have tested LTSP for max of 10 computers, but the requests coming to us
> > are for more than 30 computers per lab and that also with full
> > multimedia support if possible.
> > So, I would like to ask few questions about the full scale deployment of
> > LTSP, specially K12 LTSP
> > 1. How well does this set up cope with Multimedia applications? What
> > Multimedia tools and applications can be run on the client end running
> > in 30 computers simultaneously?
> K12LTSP handles multimedia pretty well, but it depends a bit on what you
> mean by 'multimedia'.  Do you mean streaming video from websites?
> Mplayer and the mplayer plugin for Firefox work pretty well.  William
> Fragakis just posted instructions to this list the other day on how to
> get this all to work.  It's pretty simple.

Heavy Flash in full screen mode applications is reported to be a slow
down. Without which even 100mbps network is good enough. But with the
costs of 1/2 port gig and 30 port 100mbps swithces bein low you would
rather have gig uplink to switch.

> > 2.For 30 terminals how many servers would be required assuming we have
> > to use multimedia apps like flash and other interactive elements?
> You can probably get away with a single server for 30 clients. I'd
> suggest either a 2Ghz or greater dual processor or  dual core system,
> with 4GB of RAM.  You should have a good gigabit NIC in the server, and
> the switch should have a gigabit port for the server, and 100Mb ports
> for the clients; typically, these come as a 24+2 switch with 24 100Mb
> ports plus two 1Gb ports.  Of course, you could use two servers, each
> with 2GB RAM, each with a good gigabit card and a 24+2 switch.  But that
> costs more than a single box, but eliminates a single point of failure.
>

I would rather that you spend money on SCSI disk than SATA/PATA if you
are looking at 30 clients running concurrently.

> > 4. What kind of networking could be required (gigabit backplane with
> > router or some other configuration) and also will load balancing will be
> > required or not?
> >

Load balancing would come in if you are putting up more than one
server. As I said above one server with maxed RAM and SCSI disk is
good enough for these numbers. If you can go for dual core CPU it
would be even better. But my approach would be top reduce points of
admin to minimum.

-- 
Regards,
Sudev Barar