[K12OSN] New Building's LTSP Server -- NEW WRINKLE

Jim Kinney jim.kinney at gmail.com
Tue Jul 5 13:06:47 UTC 2011


Agreed! The testing of proposed apps is vital. TuxMath is fantastic for all
school ages but it's a serious bandwidth hog. ditto for TuxType (both are
raw pixmaps at full screen resolution running 30 fps over a network
connection! Poor client video performance can impact these as well as
resource starvation on the server.)

A major factor is LTSP servers is RAM. There's no such thing as too much
RAM!

On Tue, Jul 5, 2011 at 8:48 AM, Terrell Prude' Jr. <
microman at cmosnetworks.com> wrote:

> Depends on which apps you're running. A few years back before all the EDU
> Web sites started infecting themselves with Adobe Flash, I'd have said HECK
> YEAH! For the standard office-type stuff (OpenOffice.org, programming
> classes, "normal" Web surfing, etc.), any of those machines would be great.
> Also, for stuff like TuxType/Math, ChildsPlay, and similar games, you're
> golden with such servers.
>
> OTOH, if you're talking about doing streaming multimedia, and *especially*
> Adobe Flash, you might need something a bit beefier, CPU-wise. The ProLiant
> DL580 G3 is a Pentium-4 architecture, which of course is not as fast as the
> "Core 2" architecture, clock for clock. The same applies for the SuperMicro
> P4DP8-G2 motherboards. Both of these motherboards have Gigabit Ethernet,
> which is very important.
>
> It's worth it to try a server and see. What you could do is try a pilot
> test with, say, 5 thin clients, then bump up to 10, and see how things go.
> With Gigabit Ethernet, if you're doing a class full of TuxType or TuxMath
> sessions, understand that you'll get about 14 client sessions before you
> saturate the Gig-E link. Be sure to do multiple types of tests with whatever
> the kids are expected to be doing. If they don't have enough oomph, then
> they'd likely make great file/print/Web/etc. servers.
>
> Depending on your thin clients, K12LTSP 5.0EL might be a very good choice
> at this point, since it's battle tested and proven over several years and
> has relatively low server CPU requirements.
>
> --TP
>
>
>
> Joseph Bishay wrote:
>
>> Hello everyone,
>>
>> I hope you are all doing well and had an enjoyable long weekend.
>>
>> A few weeks back I received some excellent advice with regards to
>> setting up a new LTSP network in our new elementary school building.
>> I had already sourced out the parts and was just about to order them
>> when a donation arrived at my door!  I received 5 servers with the
>> following specifications:
>>
>> 1) One Proliant DL580 G3 4U rackmount server (2 Dual-Xeon (4 threads
>> total) running at 3 Ghz.
>> 2) FOUR Super p4DP8-G2 2U rackmount servers (Each has 2 Dual-core Xeon
>> (4 threads total) running at 2.40 Ghz, 512 KB cache, 4 GB RAM (max is
>> 64 GB) with Adaptec 2010s RAID controller and hot-swappable drives.
>>
>> So I wanted to mention these machines to see if I can utilize them for
>> our LTSP network if possible, or should I stick with my original plan
>> which was using another machine that we have:
>>
>> Intel i5 with 12 GB RAM, PCI-E SSD boot drive, Raid 1 SATA drives for
>> /home
>>
>> Granted the newly donated machines are all server-grade, with
>> redundant power supplies, etc as compared to the i5 which is a custom
>> desktop build.
>>
>> We need to power about 65 thin clients in the new building -- and for
>> many in the building this will be the first foray into Linux (which
>> they are nervous about) so I want the setup to wow them.
>>
>> Thanks very much!
>>
>> Joseph
>>
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-- 
-- 
James P. Kinney III

As long as the general population is passive, apathetic, diverted to
consumerism or hatred of the vulnerable, then the powerful can do as they
please, and those who survive will be left to contemplate the outcome.
- *2011 Noam Chomsky

http://heretothereideas.blogspot.com/
*
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