Subject: Re: Linux network design
From: James Bagley Jr. (james@thelostnet.net)
Date: Thu Feb 07 2002 - 20:56:52 AKST
If it's a small office it might be easier to setup one system with all the
office software you will need then configure the rest of the workstations
as dumb X terminals. No messy network filesystems, domain authentication
models, or individual workstation configurations to work out. You can
even boot your X terminals diskless with etherboot/netboot. This is
reasonably scalable, but breaks if you need cpu-intensive or
graphics-intensive engineering applications. IMHO this would be the most
painless way to run a small to mid-sized office.
I suppose you could run larger networks like this as well, but you would
need multiple servers with some type of load balancing and that starts
geting complicated.
I've played with this kind of setup but haven't used it in a production
environment yet. Are there any pitfalls to this type of design that i'm
missing?
On Thu, 7 Feb 2002, Matt Heavner wrote:
>
> There is also nis/yp (network information services/yellow pages) which
> shares /etc/passwd type info--so you have consistent passwords on all
> machines, consistent user and group IDs (which is pretty important for
> keeping nfs from being a horrendous mess).
>
> quotas also get important on shared drives, and having separate drives
> for spools, /home amd some tmp space is a good idea. (This keeps
> things like an infinite .forward loop getting out of control and
> taking out /home along with killing mail.)
>
> similarly logs can get to be a mess, so a generalized networked
> logging is pretty crucial.
>
> also having much of /etc centralized (such as /etc/printcap) through
> daily refresh scripts is a good idea.
>
> At work we have ~220 *NIX machines (~180 of them are Linux) that are
> setup somewhat as described above.
>
> At 14:42:38 on day 7 of February 2002, Mike Barsalou spread the news:
>
> >
> > I would like to start a discussion about setting up a completely Linux
> > office. One of the things I was thinking about was how users store files
> > etc.
> >
> > It seems to me how you would do this in Linux is on the client computer you
> > might use NFS to mount the server share on your machine.
> >
> > What other ideas do people have about this?
> >
> > Mike
> >
>
>
-- ... Any resemblance between the above views and those of my employer, my terminal, or the view out my window are purely coincidental. Any resemblance between the above and my own views is non-deterministic. The question of the existence of views in the absence of anyone to hold them is left as an exercise for the reader. The question of the existence of the reader is left as an exercise for the second god coefficient. (A discussion of non-orthogonal, non-integral polytheism is beyond the scope of this article.)
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