On Thursday 02 November 2006 19:48, Michael Eilon wrote: > > Such "diskless" Linux workstations would be ideal: I can keep PC numbers > up, but with minimal maintenance (any problems -> hit reset and walk away). > Another idea could be to set up a central server, run terminal services on it and then PXE boot the clients. This would give you more functionality and a more responsive system, at the cost of needing a very decent (read new) server to run it off. Edubuntu is set up to do this very easily, could be worth a look.
The most interesting advantage of this is that if it works, the only machine you're actually messing with is the server. The worker-nodes are simply "plug-in-and-forget" You will have better results indeed with a high-end server, specially the storage is crucial, because the more NFS clients you server needs to feed, the faster I/O it needs. I think any hardware SCSI RAID card would bear the pain. and 1G NIC with 1G uplink to the server's NFS interface is also a good thing. I am feeding with 1 such beast about 50 nodes. on 1Gb link. and about the 1/2 of it on 100M link. But, it all depends on the applications you will use.
Regards again, Max.
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