[K12OSN] New EL6 install

[Jomegat]

Hi everyone,

Just thought I'd report some status.  I have switched my school over to 
a new server running K12Linux EL6-64.  Before, we were running on 
another server with K12LTSP EL5-64.  So far so good, but I have a little 
more work to do.

As has been widely reported, Adobe Flash is terrible on TC's, and my 
case is no exception.  If Hurricane Irene allows, I will spend some time 
this weekend enabling local applications.  I will probably also run 
ooimpress (if not the entire oo suite) locally, as running several slide 
shows at once brought my old system to its knees.  During an open house. 
  It was not pretty!

I will probably also upgrade Firefox to something a little more 
up-to-date than 3.6.  I don't know if it's related to the poor flash 
performance or what, but FF 3.6 has a tendency to put itself in the 
offline mode at the least convenient times (such as when students are 
trying to use the Internet).

I did see some really strange things during the initial setup.  The real 
head-scratcher was that I bought a managed switch on eBay a while back 
and decided to try it out here.  It was to replace the 10/100 switch 
between my TC's and terminal server.  The new switch has 24 10/100 ports 
and a pair of gigE ports.  The new switch appears to work in every 
regard except - no TC can boot through it.  For now I am stuck with my 
old 10/100 switch.  The managed switch is a Dell PowerConnect 3024 (if 
memory serves), so if anyone knows how to coax that into working between 
a cluster of TC's and a terminal server, I'm all ears.

The other really bizarre thing is something I ought to be punished for 
(and... I guess I was).  I got my hands on a used Netgear 5-port gigE 
switch a while back.  It was reported to be dodgy, but I ignored the 
warning.  I have been using this switch on the WAN side of my terminal 
server for about a year with no problems.  It's my "green" network in my 
IPCop setup, meaning it sits between my terminal server and the 
firewall/gateway.  As I said, it was working great - until I plugged a 
second gigE machine into it.  The second gigE connection cannot get an 
ip address via DHCP.  It can get it just fine if I disconnect the other 
gigE machine, but then THAT one can't get an IP.  No matter what, a 
second gigE machine cannot get on.  I should write a warning on its case 
with permanent marker.

To get around that, I temporarily replaced the dodgy Netgear switch with 
an 8-port 10BaseT hub that I had lying around.  Ouch!  I would have used 
the eBay switch instead, but it was at my office and not at the school - 
until last night anyhow.  Yesterday after work I brought the managed 
switch in and retired the 10BaseT hub.  It all seems to work pretty OK now.

The other adventure I had was in migrating my users from the old box to 
the new box.  I added their accounts and then rsync'd their home 
directories over, excluding all the dot files.  Logins failed.  After an 
hour of chasing that down I found a recipe that worked.  Delete the user 
accts, delete their home directories, adduser, and then log in allowing 
Gnome to create its magical files.  THEN rsync the files from the old 
server.  I guess rsync doesn't overwrite new files, so the gnome was all 
happy.  I was able to login again after all that.

So as soon as I can get Flash and FF running as local apps, I think 
we'll be golden.  I will eventually move my webserver from the old 
server to the new (we're running openbiblio on that), and once that's 
done, I will have a spare, unused, and unneeded server.

Warran - maybe you want it?  It's a 1U blade from Monarch with two 
CPU's.  Here are some selected bits from /proc/cpuinfo:

model name      : AMD Opteron(tm) Processor 246 HE
cpu MHz         : 1992.406
bogomips        : 3987.22

and from /proc/meminfo:
MemTotal:      4059588 kB

It has only a single IDE drive in it, but it does have a SATA bus (no 
SATA drives).  It has NINE fans in it, and they are... not quiet.  I 
replaced the two noisiest ones which brought the noise level down to 
something more reasonable.  It sounds like a vacuum cleaner now instead 
of like a jet engine.

Maybe that could help you with LTS clustering?  I will have a much 
easier time getting cash to ship something rather than cash to donate. 
For some reason, that's more palatable to the powers that be.  I also 
have an 8-port 10BaseT hub I can give you ;-)

If you don't want the server, I'll be looking for suggestions on how 
best to put it to use.

-- 
Jim Thomas            Principal Applications Engineer  Bittware, Inc
jthomas at bittware.com  http://www.bittware.com    (603) 226-0404 x536
Eternity is a very long time, especially towards the end. - Stephen Hawking