Quick question about load balancing

[Jonathan Carter]

Hi Robin

On Thu, 2006-06-08 at 10:35 +0100, Robin Shepheard wrote:
> I figure that once they have made an initial connection to boot the os
> the ssh tunnel should always use the same server and not query dns
> during the session, am I correct in this assumption?? Does anyone have
> a working example????
> 
> If no one can help I shall setup a test system, but I thought I would
> try here and save a little time if I can

This isn't really answering your question, but might be of some help.
What we've done in tuXlabs, based on a suggestion from the K12-LTSP
list, is to use two LTSP servers in a big lab of 80 computers.

What they suggested is, to just put two LTSP servers next to each other.
DHCPD has a feature where it takes longer to respond to dhcp requests
the higher the server load is. So all you need to do is set up the two
servers with two IP addresses (in our case, 192.168.0.254 and
192.168.0.253), then edit the lts.conf file to specify the correct X
server. Then, you need to set up a common filesystem on one of the
servers so that users will have access to the same data no matter what
server they log on too. We used an NIS/NFS combination, but LDAP seems
to be the prefered way if you have enough time.

Even though this is a very crude method of load averaging, it works
fantastically. What's very interesting and strange is, that the 80 PC's
in the lab booted up as a perfect 40/40 split between the servers.

What would be even nicer though, is if you could have better and proper
load balancing within LTSP, so that actual processes could be shared.
You could probably do that by clustering the servers, something else
that sounds like fun to play with.

-Jonathan