On Wed, 24 Jul 2002 10:28:54 -0500, "Jason A. Pattie" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
wrote:
> I know this is slightly off the wall, but 28 40GB hard drives aren't
> going to fit in a single server machine. Why not leave them in the
> clients, inform the users that they can never turn their computers off,
> and setup network RAID with each workstation participating as a node in
> the RAID array? This can be easily implemented using ENBD (which may
> make it into LTSP as a standard addon anyway for accessing local block
> devices).
Sure; they make exrternal cabinets; SCSI will do this easily, with the latest SCSI
standards they can handle 16 drives per buss. This is a LOT of drives, but it's not a
new level of computing or anything...
I also understand that there are SLAN (or whatever they call'em) drives that just
hook to the network.
> Depending on the reliability of the RAID array that you want, you could
> divy up the workstations so that at maximum, you could have all but 7
> workstations turned off before the RAID array would fail. Since 28
> cannot be evenly divided by 3, then next best would be 4, so you could
> have a 4 node RAID 5 "cluster" with 7 drives in each cluster all
> mirrored. Each of those mirrored 7 drives act as a single node in the 4
> node RAID 5 array. Of course, if you had a way to guarantee uptime on
> the workstations, you could setup a massive RAID storage array,
> literally giving yourself all the space from all 28 harddrives which
> would be enormous. 28*40 = ~1.12 TB !!!! You may want to look into
> implementing GFS to see if that would allow conglomeration of your hard
> drives. In this way, you can share all that space from the server and
> have all your workstations run off the server for their applications
> with the applications data being stored on the workstations hard drives
> without the workstations actually directly using their own hard drives.
> Of course in this scenario, you will want nothing less than a 100MB
> network (Gigabit network if they can afford it). If not, forget
> everything I've just said. :)
Eh...I have it on good authority that RAID volumes, even if you have 100 drives,
it STILL can lose only one at a time...which kinda defeats the purpose, if you ask me.
And people in a previously-Windows world are very likely to turn off machines at
random times; I really wouldn't trust it. And what happens when the power goes out?
Willl you be able to afford a gaggle of UPSs?
I know what you're pushing for here, and it's clever. But having converted a
place to Linux before (following the same kinda plan) I have to suggest you ignore the
incredible amount of flexability and ability to do things 'on the cheap' because when
people are griping at you because you saved money, say, on network hubs and it makes
ALL nodes run crappy, there'll be just one assesment from everyone, anti-Linux or not:
Linux sucks, let's go back into slavery. And the problem is, the next time someone
brings up a conversion again, it'll get shot down. (!)
I'd get the base system set up and prove on a couple of machines that all is well,
then slowly (like 1-2 a day) convert the other workstations over and hang onto the
drives, possibly adding them to mountpoints as you go. (Put a LOT of space onto
/homes and mount'em in such a way that they can't create device or SUID files on that
partition.)
Also: remember that these machines (assuming you'll boot from floppies until you
get bootproms) will only need 16M; so anything left over on them can go into the
server....and you probably won't need to buy more, but put a GIG on that server.
Drop Netscape if at all possible: it breaks, and Galeon's a LOT better. Sylpheed
is really good for email, too, so you won't need Netscape at all, except at certain
websites. You can leave it there, but make Galeon the default, make'em type
"netscape-communicator &" if they want to run it, put Galeon under an icon.
Investigate the K12 sites for software. There are a LOT of programs for tracking
grades and turning in homework and such. Another good source is http://www.seul.org
(I think: Simple End-User Linux) and I believe http://www.k12ltsp.org.
In short, there are a lot of folks already doing things like this, so do a Google
search (http://www.Google.com/linux) and see what all you can find.
If you need help with any of this, just drop me a line.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Brian Fahrländer Linux Zealot, Conservative, and Technomad
Evansville, IN My Voyage: http://www.CounterMoon.com
ICQ 5119262
------------------------------------------------------------------------
I don't want to hear news from Isreal until the news contains the words
"Bullet", "Brain", and "Arafat".
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