> Does anyone here have enough clients connecting that a dual cpu machine
> wasn't enough?  If so, what kind of hardware are you using and how many
> people does it support?

I don't and I haven't, but it started some thoughts (what would I do?), so 
here's my two cents:

There's always multiple LTSP servers:
- One file server (not that much CPU or RAM (thinking 512), but lots of 
redundant storage). This has one partition for the Linux distro, one for the 
users' home dirs, and two partitions for configuration files (one /etc that 
the file server mounts and one /etc that the processing servers uses).
- Two or more processing servers (dual CPU, lots of RAM). These mount /home 
and probably /etc from the file server, while the distro can be stored on a 
cheap 20 GB IDE locally which can be synced when distro updates are done (or 
it can of course be network mounted too, it would have to be tested how much 
impact it had). This is a throwaway disk, if it breaks simply exchange it and 
sync the new disk with the file server.

Gigabit network between the servers of course, perhaps in a seperate network 
(so the processing servers all have two network interfaces). Then set up the 
clients to different servers (ISC DHCP can alternate between which servers it 
hands out as long as they are not more than two...).

More transparent clustering could be done I guess (Beowulf is a famous name, 
though I don't know anything about it). I found openMosix the other day which 
promise to offload processes to other processors on the network (ie it makes 
the server utilize leftover CPU on the clients) at only 3% network overhead. 
Someone has made it work for LTSP, so for people having good clients just go 
ahead I guess (my clients need all the CPU they can get, thank you very 
much). But openMosix (or other clustering technologies) might work well with 
a simple processing LTSP client sitting on a gigabit connection to the 
server... so all the administration and logic stays on the server, but when 
you need more CPU you just hook in a client with a motherboard, good CPU, 
some RAM and a gigabit network card, and you can add those. It is probably 
not that efficient in office-use cases such as LTSP (vs. more CPU-intensive 
stuff), but it would have been fun to have tried it.

// Dag Sverre



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