steve <mail@steve-ss.com> writes:
We have a amd 2200 server with 1024 Mb. This is a nfs server for /home rw to 23 PII 450 clients using NIS. 9.2 is local on all disks. All clients use kdm to log into kde.
The bottleneck is usually the NFS server's disk which must handle many random-access requests. In your situation, I would probably create a RAM disk on the server and use it during lectures. Students could have their personal home directories on the server's hard disk but special accounts used during lectures would have home directories on the RAM disk. The content of the RAM disk could be initialized before each lecture. At the end of the lecture, students could copy new files into their home directories on the hard disk. In this case, IMHO, a slow IDE HD on the server would handle the load quite OK. You just need sufficient amount of RAM on the server. Companies usually use fast disk arrays with large battery powered caches. Alternatively, a different file system (for instance GPFS) may also distribute the load. But the price of these solutions may be high. Well, sometimes very high. As far as the software is concerned: If the packages are in RPM then I would install them on each client. -- A.M.