On December 18, 2014, Michael Torrie wrote: > Back to Dan's question. What is your end goal here? What will the > PXE-booted workstations be used for?
The idea is to have a central location for all software, all the O/S, etc.... The workstation should be fast, although perhaps it doesn't quite need to be SSD fast. The server is booting via it's own SSD, and then has a Raid 5 of Mechanical HDDs (not Mechanical SSDs, which I've never heard of either, and I have no idea how I missed that I wrote that :| ). Each workstation would boot into a full X environment with the NFS root and with a samba share or a separate NFS share for the RAID itself. Once booted, each machine would be an independent workstation that happens to be diskless (except for a couple of machines that have an optical drive, which most would not have). It would have full access to every day apps like LibreOffice, Firefox, Thunderbird, etc... and the goal is to keep the access speed and load times as close as possible to the times they would be if each machine had booted from it's own SSD. As long as Gigabit will work for this, then that's fine. I think I'll use the advice of trying it and then upgrading if necessary. Thanks! --- Dan On Thu, Dec 18, 2014 at 10:32 PM, Michael Torrie <[email protected]> wrote: > On 12/17/2014 11:05 PM, Olli Ries wrote: > > just ran across > http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTg2NDc > > which covers Michaels experience with USB NICs > > One of the comments on that article recommended the TRENDnet TU3-ETG USB > 3.0 gigabit adapter. Says it uses a lot less power than the Plugable > brand ones, which is important when using on a small ARM board. In > speed tests I've found, most of these little USB3 gigabit dongles are > remarkably fast. Within 90-95% of a PCIe gigabit adapter. > > Back to Dan's question. What is your end goal here? What will the > PXE-booted workstations be used for? Because yes gigabit is a lot > slower than average SATA speeds, but in practice you could run a Linux > PXE booted system on a gigabit NFS root and hardly notice the difference > for many things. App load times would be a bit slower of course. The > Linux Terminal Server Project have been pxe booting full graphical > clients for years on even 100 Mbit and nor 1000 Mbit and it has been > quite useable. > > > > /* > PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net > Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug > Don't fear the penguin. > */ > /* PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug Don't fear the penguin. */
