Planning the rollout

[Gavin McCullagh]

On Tue, 06 Feb 2007, Dmitri Minaev wrote:

> I meant because of the hardware configuration of the server. I read
> that the LTSP server requires around 100Mb RAM per client. I've got
> only 256...

Understood.

> > The next version of Edubuntu (Feisty) is supposed to include an LDAP setup.
> > So, I guess it would make sense to use that for global account details.
> 
> Yes, I've heard about it and, I think, I could survive till April-May
> with a simpler setup, like simply copying /etc/passwd and other such
> files to the workstations :).

I recently moved to using two thin client servers in parallel and am using
NIS rather while we wait on LDAP.  I did consider an rsync-style thing but
I didn't want teachers to have to understand that they had to add accounts
to machine1 and then wait until midnight before logins would work on
machine2.

> To create a new .deb every time I add a new user sounds like an
> overkill to me...

Absolutely.  Sorry I was thinking of conf files in general rather than user
stuff. For examples your cups printers.conf, some global gconf settings,
etc.   I don't think I'd advocate packaging for passwd files.  Although:

 - you script creation
 - you could probably script the machines to check for packages and upgrade
   every 10 minutes (as you could with rsync of course).

I guess there's not much difference between the rsync and the .deb way
really.  It just sort of sounded like an elegant solution -- in particular
you could do things like add a dependency for an extra package you want
installed on all machines automatically all within the aot/dpkg facilities
which are already on the machine.

Gavin