Mailinglist Archive: opensuse (3138 mails)

[Louis Richards <louis@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, 2004-12-29 at 18:26, steve wrote:
> > I think there may
> > be confusion over *where* the apps need to execute.
> 
> I don't care where it runs. I just want it to run at an acceptable speed and 
> without me having to install it on each and every client's local disk.
> 
> Both the nfs and ssh methods work but are too slow. Id' like to be able to say 
> to my director that I'd need x-GB ram and a y-GB scsi disk. Or maybe no one 
> has been here before and I have to buy 1024 ram chips until it works. . .:-(
> 
> Does anyone have any concrete information? Or maybe one simply doesn't do 
> things this way.
> 
> Cheers and thanks for your patience and help.
> Steve.

LTSP has some docs on their page about server requirements. These should
be similar to the SSH requirements. I have run 12 clients on a similar
server (1800 with 1024) using LTSP. The users did NOT generaly all load
and save at the same time ... things were random. Under these
circumstances, performance was surprisingly usable.

Drive speed would be crucial with either SSH or NFS. The server above
used two high quality SCSI drives in a mirror set (software RAID). Read
access on RAID is faster as data can be accessed in parallel.

I have never tried this ... but what would happen if you exported the
/usr directory from the server and mounted it somplace else on the
clients. If you added the new paths last on the clients, wouldn't they
use the server only when the required libs and binary files were not
local? Just a thought and it may hose things up due to lib conflicts.

As either SSH of NFS is going to bite into the network, you may want to
consider two nics in the server and good switches if you're not there
already. Two subnets with 10 clients each. NICS and small switches are
cheap these days. It's hard to see where the bottleneck is without
monitoring network and server load.

Admittedly the last two items were just "thinking out loud". I could not
resist. This thread is about real stuff and the most fun one available
to respond to ;-)

Oh ... and Steve's idea of scripting access to the clients sounds like a
winner too. I manualy ssh to each client now and it is a bit of a pain.
For updates, I export /var/lib/YaST2/you/mnt/ from the server
(rw,no_root_squash,sync). At least this way updates are only downloaded
once.

Please let us know what ever you decide and how it works out. This is
why I subscribed here.

Louis Richards