Ubuntu Server with LTSP in real life

[Brian Fahrlander]

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Paul Thompson wrote:

> 
> On 3/30/07, David Delony <ickyelf at gmail.com> wrote:
>> I'm find the concept of a centralized server and diskless workstations using
>> Ubuntu intriguing. How does Ubuntu and LTSP hold up under real use?
>
> Very well, I have three separate groups running in a smb environment.
> One for sales, one for accounting and one mixed at our Wellington
> branch (I am in Auckland). All work flawlessly and are running around
> 5 to 8 users each.
> 
> Am using Edgy on two and Dapper on the other.

    First....how did I miss the start of this thread?  :)

    Second, Paul, that's very cool; I started in LTSP back when
Etherboot had just changed over, probably about 1996-97. I had 12 users
running old tired 486's in a lumber yard, and only a couple of things
caused me grief:

    1. Bandwidth. Our 'wiring gods' were people who installed the
ethernet as telephone lines, using punchdowns, so we did good to get
much over 2-3M/s, so things got tight real quick- especially before we
set the screensavers to blank. (That kinda sucks) Have a real network.

    2. There *is* a point of obsolescence; 486's have plenty of power to
be Xterminals, but getting RAM for them can be a little tough to do.
Thankfully, that's not much of a problem, since they're so old anyway,
that you usually get the entire machine for free. :)  And with Vista
knocking, we'll all be running "puny' dual-core Pentium 4's soon with a
'mere' 1G of memory because Windows can't live there anymore...so
wasting CPU become the norm.

    3. Though the LTSP servers are really, really solid, it makes
working on them more difficult; any work, even short reboots or whatever
have to happen *after* most of the users have gone.  But the way Dapper
is looking, with the ever-so-rare kernel/glibc releases (unlike Fedora)
so this shouldn't be a big problem.  I'd suggest _at_least_ some kind of
software raid, preferably a good, Linux-friendly hardware raid, and some
hot-swappable power supplies. And plenty of RAM.

    4. Small challenge: setting the workstations up to be similar in
Gnome/KDE. Putting company-wide wallpapers and prepping the browsers to
go to the company intranet requires a little fiddling, but it's
documented in the wiki.

    5. Big perk: seeing the boss' face when you tell him he *doesn't*
need to invest several thousand dollars into a solution for everyone and
gets to avoid a potential $100,000 hit from the BSA: priceless.

    LTSP is a great bunch of guys.  I might never again need an LTSP
setup, since I'm on the outbound side of my computer career, but it was
very, very cool when I was there.  You'll learn a lot about the hardware
and just how cheap it can be...and how happy the boss can be, too.  Just
be ready and test it before you put real users on, in case you've
forgotten something.

- --
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 Brian Fahrländer                 Christian, Conservative, and Technomad
 Evansville, IN                              http://Fahrlander.net/brian
 ICQ: 5119262                         AOL/Yahoo/GoogleTalk: WheelDweller
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