Barry,
you are sort of right. "sort of", because your cautions belong to
a large installation, say 1600 stations, not 160. switches take care of
most of the contention problems and if you really run out of bandwidth on
1 100MHz full duplex link, then you want to add another card. all the
routing will be done internally. Barry, you are thinking "cheap, often
failing equipent", i am thinking "inexpensive, never failing equipment".
what you suggested makes perfect sense if you multiply the number of
stations by 10, better 15. i am willing to concede that i was just darn
lucky this last 30 years. julius
On Tue, 5 Mar 2002, Barry McCormick wrote:
> I only started using LTSP a couple of days ago, but I worked for quite a while as a
>network engineer, so this answer is based on some network issues.
>
> 1. you don't want 160 computers on the same subnet/network. You will see problems
>and degradation. Break them up into subnets and put routers between the networks. I
>might suggest FreeSCO router (Linux, free, only needs a floppy drive and 2 nics, 16
>meg of ram and a 386). Go to www.freesco.org and check that out.
>
> 2. Make sure you set up secondary servers in your ltsp.conf files. so that if one
>of your servers goes down the second can pickup the load.
>
> 3. Also, the topography of the wiring and the layout of the network cables make a
>big difference. Hopefully if it is a new installation you are running 10/100
>network, and make sure that all of the classroom routers go back to the central
>firewall/router to send to the internet.
>
> 4. You didn't state the requirements for uptime, but I am assuming you want a
>pretty good uptime for classes, so my suggestion is to put 2 smaller servers in each
>classroom, split the load between the two, and have the other one set as the failover
>for the other.
>
> 5. DHCP - obviously you are going to have to run multiple DHCP servers, probably
>one on every server on each subnet. Be very careful with the numbering scheme you
>use for each subnet and how the two servers in the same room designate ip addresses.
>If you accidentally duplicate numbers on the two servers, you will play hell running
>down the error.
>
>
> For what it is worth, there is my 2 cents worth. Maybe it will help you think the
>design through a little more.
>
> Barry McCormick
> BMac2
> www.bmac2.net
> [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
>
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On Behalf Of Jo
> Sent: Tuesday, March 05, 2002 12:50 PM
> To: morten
> Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Subject: Re: [Ltsp-discuss] hardware demands for Server when having 160
> client computers?
>
>
> I would say: certainly not one big server. I don't have a lot of experience
> either, but you don't want all your eggs in one bag. I read an article where
> they wired two classrooms to one server on one network with the server on
> another network for intra- and internet access. I think such a setup makes
> sense. Maybe you could have 6 servers and create 3 LANs. 1 for two classrooms
> another for two other classrooms and a third for 3 (smaller) classrooms. Each
> LAN would get 2 servers for redundancy and load balancing. This way you would
> end up with 4 separate LANs. (Of course I would use 10/100 switches for them.
> 3COM has some nice 16 port switches for more or less 30 EUR) The servers
> would sit on the school LAN on one NIC and on the TS LAN on the other side.
> Somewhere else I read that multiprocessor machines don't age gracefully, so I
> would go for Pentium III, Pentium IV or AMD servers with lots of memory (>512
> MB) and quick disks. Maybe a RAID5 array of SCSI disks? You should test
> performance with one such LAN subnet and see if you are happy with it.
> You also have to think about where to put the user's home directories. Maybe
> on yet another server on the central LAN?
>
> I hope I haven't been talking too much nonsense here... The other people on
> the list will surely correct me if I'm exaggerating :)
>
> Greetings,
>
> Jo
>
> PS:
>
> On Wednesday 06 March 2002 04:59, you wrote:
> > I am setting up a LTS on a "test" school in 2 weeks and i am new to Linux.
> > This school is one of many where we want to install LTS. I have some
> > problems finding out how big and many servers i need for this. We need to
> > keep expences nown on minimal so it has to be a compromise solution between
> > investment and quality.
> > There will be 160 thin client conected. They will use KDE desktop as the
> > default. They will all be running Star Office, Opera, and a educational
> > program that in Windows use the same amont of resoureses as IE5.(this
> > software is under development for Linux)
> > There is 9 classrooms and they wil all be conected trough interenet using
> > the same good conection.
> > Should we go for few/one big real server og many smaller strong computers
> > as servers, One in each 2 classroom.
> > Do anyone have experiences with this?
> >
> > Thanks
> > Morten
> >
> >
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