[GRLUG] Apologies for not making it.

[Adam Tauno Williams]

On Tue, 2009-11-24 at 08:17 -0500, Ben Rousch wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 24, 2009 at 1:25 AM, Michael Mol <mikemol at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> > I suspect he didn't need two 32GB SSDs in RAID 0, but I don't have
> > nough context. My gut tells me GigE+netboot would work if the RAM
> > were bumped up to 16GB. File caches are wonderful things, and a full
> > install+favored apps of a desktop edition of Ubuntu 8.10 with only
> > /home put off to another drive left me with less than 7GB on /. 
> > Heck,>you could conceivably make that 7GB part of an initrd. :P

> We did discuss some of this last night. I'm sure Darrin will correct
> me if I'm wrong, but they originally had all of the homes remotely
> mounted on a server. However with all 28 stations logging in at the
> same time (as a class starts),

Really?  We used to have 100+ stations logging in, running Netscape 4.x,
with NFS mounted home directories without any issues.  And that over
100MBps ethernet.

>  then the kids all using Firefox or Chromium (think cache files), the

Yep, .netscape was always a large portion of I/O (open files).  But it
is a shower of small operations,  it is hard to imagine 28 boxes being
able to clog a 1GBps connection.

>  network or server drives had trouble keeping up. 

Ah, I'd wager the server has a lame I/O subsystem and that was the root
of the problem.  Were there specs from that?

> By moving the homes to local storage, they were able to take a big
> burden off the server and network. Still, all of the students' data
> (Documents, Videos, Photos, etc) are mapped to the server, and they
> are working on getting things like Gnome settings up there too.

It is really sad that the push to make GConf network aware, or use LDAP,
never went anywhere.

> 8GB seems like plenty of RAM. I don't remember seeing it go over 2GB
> while four of us played with the same station.

WAY back in the day I hosted ~8 users on a server with dual-P1-233MHz
with 64MB of RAM.  They were using NCD X-Stations (thin clients) and
running Netscape and Wordperfect [in XFCE if I recall correctly].  It
actually worked really well.  Additional users had really surprisingly
little cost in resources.