[ubuntu-uk] OpenSSI on Ubuntu (with LTSP thrown in for good measure)

[Alistair Crust]

On Tue, 2008-01-29 at 15:41 +0000, Rob Beard wrote:
...<snip>
> Anyway, one of the guy's who is involved with the project mentioned  
> about setting up some sort of clustering so that the burden of running  
> multiple clients can be spread over two or more machines.
> 
> I've found details on OpenSSI which appears to support LTSP on Fedora  
> Core 3 although the details are a bit lacking.  I was wondering if  
> anyone had had a play around with OpenSSI on Ubuntu, and even better  
> OpenSSI and LTSP on the same installation of Ubuntu?
> 
> Rob

Never tried it, but if you are running two machines then you can use
dhcpd load balancing and fail-over (check the man pages for dhcpd).

Or (and a way that works well for us with 150+ thin clients and 3
servers) dynamical assigned static ip's (ip's allocated dynamicaly based
on the mac address of the requesting client). Regardless of which server
responds the client always gets the same ip, so you won't end up with a
mess of ip's allocated to two different machines and the client will use
the responding server to boot from.

A variation from the above is allocating a set block of ips from the
subnet to each of the dhcpd servers. But potentially you could end up
with a client having multiple ip's (better than an ip having multiple
clients though!) and could lead to you running out of leases.

With both the above the idea is that the server with the least load will
reply quickest to a dhcpd request and thus the client will use that
server to boot from, rather than a loaded one.

I have also heard that the latest edubuntu/ltsp packages have load
balancing support, so a trip to the edubuntu mailing lists could be
good. They are a friendly bunch and most of the people responsible for
the ltsp bits hang out there.

If you end up trying it I would be interested to know how or if you get
local devices/sound to work.

Kind regards
-- 
Alistair Crust <alistair at skegnessgrammar.org>
Skegness Grammar School
Vernon Road
Skegness
Lincs
PE252QS
Tel: 01754610000