Our department will be converting a pile of old 486/33 boxes to debian linux. They will have two (expected :) primary purpose: standalone to execute lyx for writing theses & dissertations, and as x-terminals to our larger alpha workstations.
There is really no budget fo this; we're using oure obsolete machines. And there will be at best minimal formal support. The campus also has workstations throughout, with a central afs file system. "Project Vincent" is based on MIT's "Project Athena." >From the list of machines and parts, we can apparently assemble 11 machines. Between them we have 5x210mb, and 11x80mb hard drives. There is a single set of 4x4mb simms, and a slew of 1mb simms. My currrent thinking is setting up one machine as a server, with 3x210 hard drives, and 20mb memory, and the rest with 8mb, and the hard disks distributed. Setting up the server shouldn't be a problem; i've done this before. The problem is how to manage the other 10 machines, most of which will be graduate computer rooms. My current thinking is to install everything in sight on the server, put it last on the local paths, and put common executables onto the individual machines. (WIth a pair of 80mb drives, these machines don't have enough room for full installation of the packages they need.) Will this work? Another concern is password control. It would be nice to have a single place to deal with passwords, rather than all 10 user machines. Even better would be to use kerberos to verify passwords through the current Project Vincent. Is this doable? The /home directories are another concern. I suppose that these could reside on the server, but that sounds like heavy traffic. Is it practical to create a login process that untars the directory from the server, then tars and deletes it at logout? And what about auto-remounting of the server? I have heard of problems requirng rebooting of all of the clients, but this doesn't make sense. It seems that they should be able to auto-remount. For that matter, can the 486/33 handle being an afs rather than nfs server? Come to think of it, we do have novell servers for the windows machines. Could these (without modificationor upgrade :) serve the linux boxes? Rick
