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

[Les Mikesell]

On 7/4/2011 11:28 PM, 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.

I've forgotten the topology you need, but that sounds like a nice match 
for running one box as a home directory and LDAP server and a set of 
desktop servers each with a smaller number of clients.  The desktop 
servers can either be dedicated per-classroom with a 2-NIC arrangement 
(simple, but no failover) or a flat network where the dhcp service 
balances the connections (but you'd have more bandwidth contention). If 
you do it right the desktop servers would all be interchangeable and 
even in the 2-NIC scenario you could keep one as a spare that could be 
swapped in to replace any of the others.

Not sure if anyone has tried it, but I'd think ClearOS would make a good 
home directory/LDAP server without much extra setup work, and it could 
also provide email and web services if you want them.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com