A road case with covers and wheels is necessary to transport the gear safely. Power distribution and protection must be portable too.
Scaling is a matter of server and network capacity. CPU density is no problem: 1U and 2U dual quad-core motherboards and systems with 1333 FSB are readily available. I just priced a HP Proliant DL-380 with one quad-core 2.3 GHz CPU (mobo accepts 2), 2 GB 1333 FSB RAM (max 32 GB) and three 76 GB SAS drives (max 6), redundant power supplies, etc., at roughly $3000.
http://h10010.www1.hp.com/wwpc/us/en/sm/WF06a/15351-15351-3328412-241644-241475-1121516.htmlOur first LTSP lab in South Bend ran 5 thin clients on a single CPU 1000 MHz PC with 1000 MB of RAM and a single 10/100 hub. If it ran low on RAM, the server would kick a user off with no warning. Our second lab has 12-15 thin clients on a dual Xeon (hyperthread, not dual core) server with 10/100 switches. The server has 1000/100/10 NICs and several GBs of RAM; runs like a champ.
Here are the K12LTSP sizing rules. Their community does single classrooms to whole school systems on LTSP.
http://k12ltsp.org/mediawiki/index.php/Server_SizingScaling up example: City of Largo, FL. The IT director, Dave Richards, has an incredible archive of deployment and admin info on his blog.
http://www.linux.com/articles/26827 http://davelargo.blogspot.com/2006_06_01_archive.html
This quote from Richards' blog says it all.
Tuesday, July 11, 2006Gotta Love Application ServersAll of our city-wide software is run on large dedicated application servers. We all share the same code and fonts and all I have to do is upgrade in one place and everyone picks up the changes the next time they launch the application.It took me 1 minute to upgrade OpenOffice from 2.0.2 to 2.0.3 for 700 users. In the shot below, users up to 12:20 launched the old version. Users after that time picked up the new one. Those in the old version are not logged off. The two exist at the same time, and 2.0.2 is retired when the last user logs out tonight.All done. :)
Tom Robert Citek wrote:
That is a pretty cool idea. Starting small and assuming an 3 laptop LTSP (1 server + 2 clients), what equipment would be needed to make such a portable LTSP a reality? What equipment would be needed to scale up to an 8 or 12 or more laptop LTSP? What would be a reasonable maximum? Regards, - Robert On Thu, Jun 26, 2008 at 6:06 PM, Andrew Strasser <zarabtul@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:It wouldn't be that hard to set-up with all the proper equipment and the right group of people working on it. I think it's a great idea and a very good way to show how the computers can be used to people for much more important things that just typing a paper for school. I'm not much of the slapping kind, but I'll pat you both on the back and say good idea.** This list is PUBLICLY archived. ** PLEASE don't post personal or sensitive information unless you wish for it to be in the public domain. To post to the list send email to frgeek-michiana@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx The archive is available at //www.freelists.org/archives/frgeek-michiana/ You may unsubscribe or change your list settings by going to the list website at //www.freelists.org/webpage/frgeek-michiana
** This list is PUBLICLY archived. ** PLEASE don't post personal or sensitive information unless you wish for it to be in the public domain. To post to the list send email to frgeek-michiana@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx The archive is available at //www.freelists.org/archives/frgeek-michiana/ You may unsubscribe or change your list settings by going to the list website at //www.freelists.org/webpage/frgeek-michiana
