[H-GEN] Distro advice

Robert Brockway robert at timetraveller.org
Fri Jan 24 21:34:57 EST 2003


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On Sat, 25 Jan 2003, Harry Phillips wrote:

> What I would like to do is boot the workstation from a floppy and then it
> loads all the apps from the server, the difference from LTSP is that the

This is a "diskless workstation".  I believe LTSP does cover this as well
as "thin clients".  You can boot the workstations with an nfsroot
filesystem.  Ie, the entire filesystem is nfs mounted from the server.

This would mean you can do your processing on the workstations as you
want, but it is important to know that you'll throttle the servers disks
with a decent number of active workstations.  You'd need to put fast i/o
on the server - eg, scsi, in order to get the best out of the setup.

> I would imagine that the workstation would have a HDD for swap and caching

A local swap would improve performance over nfs mounted swap (yes, people
do this :)

Normally disk caching occurs in memory to greatly improve performance.

> of apps. I think you would need some sort of checking mechanism at the

> workstation to see if there was an application update when you first started
> it. User specific settings would be saved to a share on the server (sort of
> like NT profiles).

Unix has a far superior way of storing user preferences that NT.  Profiles
are a real hack :)  Just make sure all workstations have an nfs mounted
/home filesystem and all the user prefs are covered.  Since it sounds like
nfs would do what you want anyway, this is a natural way to approach the
problem.

> Does anyone know of anything like what I am describing?

Yep, this sort of thing is done often.  You can use an nfsroot setup as I
suggested above - in this case the entire filesystem comes off a central
server.  A few gotchas as some parts of the filesystem should be unique to
a box.

Having considered a few options, here is what I think is most preferable
for your setup:

Have the following filesystems on each workstation:


/	Local filesystem.
	Very small (say 64Mb).
	This includes only those parts of the system required to boot.

/usr	NFS mounted off a central server.

/var	Local filesystem.
	Size depends on what the workstation will be doing.
	Could be the same filesystem as / but then you would need to take
	this into account with the size of /

/opt	NFS mounted off a central server.

/home	NFS mounted off a central server.

/tmp	Local filesystem.  Use tmpfs & share this with swap for better
	performance.

> The reason I ask is that I am in the process of setting up a Cyber lounge
> and would like to cut down on the costs of licensing ($250/workstation just
> for the OS starts addng up VERY quickly) and we also have complete control
> of each PC (no Kazaa etc).

Restrict root access to the boxes and (assuming no one cracks it) you keep
control of the boxes.  There are quite a few ways of making it very
difficult to get into a Linux box[1]

[1] Apart from the obvious like keeping it fully patched, settng a lilo
password is greay if one of your users thinks they are pretty smart.
Combine this with restricting booting to the HD only and putting abios
password on and it is pretty difficult for someone to get control (short
of opening the case the clear the bios password or removing the HD :)

Cheers,
	-Rob

-- Robert Brockway B.Sc. email: robert at timetraveller.org  ICQ: 104781119
   Linux counter project ID #16440 (http://counter.li.org)
   "The earth is but one country and mankind its citizens" -Baha'u'llah



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