Hi!
At the school district im an admin at there are talks about implementing a large scale LTSP solution. We have been testing succesfully on one school but only with about 15 clients. The latest bid is to have one big central server. It will be serving a cuple of other schools over 1 gbit fiber connections. An estimate over the number of clients would be about 50-60 at two schools and maybe 40 additional from other smaller schools and locations.
I have been pondering this quite a bit and im a bit concerned about the cost of the server and backbones etc. Since other traffic flows in the same fibers there will have to be some kind of vlan separating the traffic since passwords etc flows unencrypted between client/server. I really would appriciate input on this since i have a thing for linux and wouldnt want an implementation to go wrong at my own turf. Is a central server a good solution or is the benefit smaller than percieved? Have anyone done this in a grand scale and what was the pitfalls in those cases?
Yes, this has been done at two locations I know of with local authorities here in Norway. One of them has an elaborate VLAN setup and fancy routing taking place. This works without problems, but required fancy equipment and costly consultants to set up. They serve six schools from a central location, only thin clients actually deployed at the schools.
You get into security -, bandwidth - and hardware issues very quickly when talking about fiber and gigabit networks, espcially running several networks on the same wire/fiber.
Im perticulary interested in how scaling have been solved on big sites. Have tried an openmosix cluster but the benefit was small since we dont run any cpu intensive applications.
Several schools here have hundreds of LTSP clients, with infrastructure to match. With today's ped apps moving to web content using Flash and Java about 50 clients seem to be the norm for a dual Xeon server with 4GB of RAM. Of course, this server can handle many more clients if you strictly limit the type of apps and window manager they are allowed to run. Perhaps three times as many.
In short, is it a good solution to get a big iron hosting everything instead of spreading several smaller Terminal Servers onsite and just centralize /home and logins?
Depends on the infrastructure and distances, I guess. It is definitely cheaper to have the LTSP servers at each location, and limit the network traffic to file and auth traffic. But then you might have to deal a larger number of servers and run around if they have issues that require hands on treatment.
You're welcome to come and have a look, we're not that far away, and there is a developers conference for Skolelinux the weekend after next in Oslo. The venue is a school with a large installation, and a separate sys admin track during the weekend.
-- Med vennlig hilsen Ragnar Wisl�ff ------------- Life is a reach. Then you gybe.
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