Re: Linux Lab & Server

[Ray Olszewski <ray@comarre.com>]

At 06:56 AM 8/14/99 +0200, Bill Tihen wrote [in part]:
>I am planning on building a trial Linux Lab for my school.  So I thought I
would get some second opinions first
....
>I was also planning on using NFS for 2 purposes.  1) To let the user save
and work directly to their user space on the server and 2) I thought that as
much software could (/usr/local/bin & /usr/bin) retrieved from the server to
simplify upgrades.  I am still hoping to have the applications run on the
local machine to keep the server's brain as free as possible for other uses.  
>
>How much of the base operating system is practical to have running with
software retrieved from the server?  I assume /bin & /sbin are not practical
to run from the server. 

Right. Also the kernel image itself, /lib, and /etc -- basically, these
directories hold the stuff the host needs to complete the boot process, or a
sysadmin needs to troubleshoot a boot failure, so they need to be on the
host.  If you are running X on the clients, there is a minimal set of stuff
that has to be local -- look at one of the Linux/XTerminal sites for the
details (let me know if you need the URLs).

Beyond that, you'll have to look at the details of your installation. On my
(Debian) systems, for example, rpc.mountd and rpc.nfsd are in /usr/sbin --
kind of hard to do NFS mounts of /usr with this setup. Similarly, inetd is
in /usr/sbin ... you get the idea.

You don't say how fast the LAN will be. Supporting 50 clients from 1 NFS
server, over 10 Mbps, will feel slow.
------------------------------------"Never tell me the odds!"---
Ray Olszewski                                        -- Han Solo
Palo Alto, CA  94303-3603    	 	        ray@comarre.com        
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