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

[Rob Beard]

On Tue, 2008-01-29 at 16:17 +0000, Alistair Crust wrote:
> 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.
> 

Great thanks, I'll have a look.  I dare say the one server which we're
going to use (Core2Quad 2.4GHz with 4GB memory) will be over kill for
the 6 clients we're going to have attached, but the geek in me would
also like to play with clustering.

I'm hoping that if the community centre project all works out we'll be
able to do more installations in the local area.

Rob