On Mon, Sep 24, 2001 at 02:50:32AM +0200, oivvio polite wrote: | | I might soon have to set up some 20 - 30 boxes supporting some 200 students. | They'll want to do word processing, browse the web, read mail. Web and mail work great with Linux, but as the previous poster said word processing is a different story. I am getting into LaTeX myself, but I would be surprised if the 200 students at that school are actually interested in learning it.
| Of course any user should be able to log into his/her account from any box. | What are my options here? Have all applications run from a powerful server | and use boxen as X-terminals, run applications on boxen and store only home | dirs on server... | | I'm looking for a setup that's easy to admin remotely and involves zero | fiddling with the individual boxen. You could have the clients be diskless X terms. This would reduce maintenance to just one machine. The downside is the load it puts on the server. With the X-terms you can run X clients locally or on the server. If you have high-end pentiums or better (with memory) I think running apps locally would be best. You will certainly want several fast SCSI disks in the server because they will get all the load. An alternative is to have each machine standalone, but with /home mounted over NFS. You would need to do something about passwords too (maybe NIS?). This has the advantage of reducing the load on the server, however you now have 20-30 separate boxes to administrate. If sshd is setup on them you can administrate remotely but it will have lots of repetition. There are ways of syncing configs if they are all identical though. I think the diskless clients is the better setup because you get more resource wastage if each system is standalone. Just think of any sort of partitioning scheme (memory, disk blocks, etc) and you realize that there is a certain amount of waste in every partition that is not completely used. In addition the diskless clients can be lower powered and still suffice. The reduced cost of low-power clients can yield more available money to beef up the server with. You may want more than one server though. | All ideas are interesting but some ideas (that have actually been implemented | and proven to work on a day-to-day basis) are more interesting. I haven't actually implemented a network like that. I tried to setup a diskless box but it can't mount it's root via NFS and I haven't debugged it yet. -D
