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Lechium Apprentice
Joined: 04 Apr 2005 Posts: 244
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Posted: Mon Jul 17, 2006 1:34 am Post subject: |
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I'd go with something VERY stable and well supported.
You do not need bleeding edge -- the benefits are small, but headaches grow exponentially with the amount of machines you manage.
At that -- Debian seems like the best solution. It may be slowish with updates, but, hey, students will use fairly limited amount or software. Also does it matter if you have newest verion of GCC, or one that is 4 months old, if you're compiling college level code?
Another soluton is CentOS, the RH-derivative that is used in my univ enegeneering labs at the moment (~200-300 computers).
These two distros are very much designed with clusters in mind, which makes that attractive. _________________ Child - Noun. Pronunciation Key: (chld)
Plural: chil·dren (chldrn)
1. An emergency food supply
2. .... |
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chrismortimore l33t
Joined: 03 Dec 2005 Posts: 721 Location: Edinburgh, UK
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Posted: Mon Jul 17, 2006 11:35 am Post subject: |
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Lechium wrote: | At that -- Debian seems like the best solution. It may be slowish with updates, but, hey, students will use fairly limited amount or software. Also does it matter if you have newest verion of GCC, or one that is 4 months old, if you're compiling college level code? | As much as I love Debian, it annoyed me that I was using software that was 3 years old, that was just too much. I was developing at a secondary school level, and I found this restrictive, but I can't quite remember why. It was something like there was stuff missing from the supplied version of GTK that I wanted or something daft like that, and I ended up having to write my own components... Joy......... _________________ Desktop: AMD Athlon64 3800+ Venice Core, 2GB PC3200, 2x160GB 7200rpm Maxtor DiamondMax 10, 2x320GB WD 7200rpm Caviar RE, Nvidia 6600GT 256MB
Laptop: Intel Pentium M, 512MB PC2700, 60GB 5400rpm IBM TravelStar, Nvidia 5200Go 64MB |
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Lechium Apprentice
Joined: 04 Apr 2005 Posts: 244
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Posted: Mon Jul 17, 2006 6:29 pm Post subject: |
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chrismortimore wrote: | Lechium wrote: | At that -- Debian seems like the best solution. It may be slowish with updates, but, hey, students will use fairly limited amount or software. Also does it matter if you have newest verion of GCC, or one that is 4 months old, if you're compiling college level code? | As much as I love Debian, it annoyed me that I was using software that was 3 years old, that was just too much. I was developing at a secondary school level, and I found this restrictive, but I can't quite remember why. It was something like there was stuff missing from the supplied version of GTK that I wanted or something daft like that, and I ended up having to write my own components... Joy......... |
Well its not like its impossible to install new software on Debian, no? They have fairly up-to-date repositories (non-default ones), that are still pretty rock solid, and not as much behind times, AFAIK. _________________ Child - Noun. Pronunciation Key: (chld)
Plural: chil·dren (chldrn)
1. An emergency food supply
2. .... |
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Omega21 l33t
Joined: 14 Feb 2004 Posts: 788 Location: Canada (brrr. Its cold up here)
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Posted: Tue Jul 18, 2006 3:58 am Post subject: |
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I would vote for ubuntu. I think the hardware detection is paramount. _________________ iMac G4 1GHz :: q6600 //2x 500GB//2GB RAM//8600GT//Gentoo :: MacBook Pro//2.53GHz |
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durian Guru
Joined: 16 Jul 2003 Posts: 312 Location: Rörums Holma
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Posted: Tue Jul 18, 2006 5:21 am Post subject: |
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Omega21 wrote: | I would vote for ubuntu. I think the hardware detection is paramount. |
It's almost scary - I installed Ubuntu on a computer last week, and everything, including wireless internet worked without me having to do anything. I was sitting there after the installation thinking "where is the fun in this"? :) |
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aidy l33t
Joined: 07 Apr 2005 Posts: 915
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Posted: Tue Jul 18, 2006 8:42 am Post subject: |
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enderandrew wrote: | chrismortimore wrote: | And for the "Why is Ubuntu great?" post earlier, I like Ubuntu because it gives you all the fun of Debian (ever seen apt-build? It's cool), but with nice tools so that "human beings" (read "idiots") can use it, and a fairly up to date package tree. Yes, it is gnome based, but if you type "apt-get install kubuntu-desktop", as if by magic it becomes KDE based. Likewise, if you type "apt-get install xubuntu-desktop" it becomes xfce4 based. And you can put in others like fluxbox if you want them. I'm going to assume that given you havn't noticed that, you dismissed it without exploring it properly |
You can put KDE on Ubuntu. I'm aware. I've seen Kubuntu. Actually the weirdest thing I've seen is their educational distro that uses many of the KDE-Edu programs, but goes out of its way to avoid using KDE.
I don't see what Ubuntu has over other distros however. Is it really better in any regard?
And if you focus solely on Gnome, then the KDE side won't see the same love. Will packages be maintained as well? Will they be looking for optimizations for KDE? Probably not. |
THAT'S BS
the kubuntu desktop is maintained by KDE people who will do everything to make it run as fast as possible and everything.
and how would you make 'optimizations' for kde anyways |
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Quatrerwin n00b
Joined: 17 Mar 2006 Posts: 33
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Posted: Fri Jul 21, 2006 1:04 pm Post subject: |
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I would say Ubuntu. If the admins really want to customize the distro they choose, there is a way to do it in Ubuntu. Ubuntu doesn't break nearly as much as Gentoo. I don't see Gentoo as being a practical distro for that kind of deployment. There is too much maintainance work involved. |
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yoshi314 l33t
Joined: 30 Dec 2004 Posts: 850 Location: PL
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Posted: Fri Jul 21, 2006 3:49 pm Post subject: |
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Quote: | Ubuntu is completely free (both as in beer and freedom). | actually ubuntu is going to be next fedora. shuttleworth is already preparing a commercial branch of the distribution. i think it will have an other name, as ubuntu is "to stay 100% free, with no premium paid version" as it says in the social contract
there is already a proprietary/commercial software repository in preparation. it has a couple of packages now, and it's free to access right now. but things will change. _________________ ~amd64
shrink your /usr/portage with squashfs+aufs |
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rafo Apprentice
Joined: 18 Nov 2003 Posts: 161 Location: Sollentuna, Sweden
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Posted: Sun Jul 23, 2006 3:06 pm Post subject: |
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I see that most people here recommend other distros than Gentoo. This leaves me a bit puzzled; if Gentoo is often a good choice for a power user, then why is it not a good choice for a power administrator?
Let me first of all underline that my personal sysadmin experience is quite modest: I have kept small collections of Solaris and Red Hat boxes in shape, but that's about it. I have never had the full responsibility of a large campus where everything has to Just Work, and all the time too.
My line of thinking is this: A Gentoo solution would certainly take some time to set up initially, as there is no HOWTO (yet). And before that some time should be invested in deciding on local policies, like what hardware to support, which desktop(s), what security infrastructure, etc (this kind of planning is of course required regardless of chosen distro).
The payback can be expected in the long run. With other distros there would be "big" upgrades when a new set of CDs are issued, and the changes coming with such an upgrade would have to be evaluated against local policies and scriptware. After a period of extensive testing, involving perhaps a group of pilot users, the new release can be made available for everyone to use.
With a Gentoo solution it should be possible to largely avoid these periods of hectic upgrade-related work. Upgrades can be deployed on a per-package on-demand basis, without heavy spikes of workload for sysadmins and pilot users.
Perhaps there is also a transparency advantage. When there is a new release of a "boxed" distro there may not be that much documentation on how individual packages have changed. And the focus may be that the upgraded package should Just Work in a single-computer environment, but will it also work in a PXE boot environment?
With Gentoo on the other hand non-trivial changes will never happen "behind the curtains". The ebuild files and the ChangeLog are in the open, and there is likely to be a forum thread where you can get information and advice, plus sometimes official HOWTOs, plus the wiki. And, if an upgrade seems doubtful, just let it mature for some time while gathering understanding.
As a user in a "campus" environment I would be quite happy to know that there will be no "big bang" periods when many applications and procedures change at the same time. After all, isn't it always the case that the big bang comes just when your personal workload is at its highest too? |
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tageiru n00b
Joined: 26 Oct 2002 Posts: 46
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Posted: Sun Jul 23, 2006 6:58 pm Post subject: |
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yoshi314 wrote: | Quote: | Ubuntu is completely free (both as in beer and freedom). | actually ubuntu is going to be next fedora. shuttleworth is already preparing a commercial branch of the distribution. i think it will have an other name, as ubuntu is "to stay 100% free, with no premium paid version" as it says in the social contract |
Are you thinking of ImpiLinux? I think this is fairly specific to South Africa though, at least according to the homepage. Ubuntu has always been intended as a platform for derivatives, ImpiLinux being one of them.
yoshi314 wrote: | there is already a proprietary/commercial software repository in preparation. it has a couple of packages now, and it's free to access right now. but things will change. |
There is a dapper-commercial repository. This will be a channel for software that needs special distribution agreements, Canonical/Ubuntu will not be charging money for access to the repository. There may be channels that require money, but these are for external distributors and not Canonical as such. |
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jpsmith n00b
Joined: 25 Apr 2002 Posts: 7
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Posted: Tue Oct 03, 2006 4:44 am Post subject: |
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You might want to consider thin clients + blade servers
You could consider enterprise monitoring installation software, that exists for the control, monitoring and installation of workstation or client images
--as well as client imaging software like Norton's Ghost or do it with linux tools tar or some other backup software (backup to dvd. cd or tape)
You might also want to check out some school board sites in the USA , where they have the problems of malfeasance by students/staff (viruses, installing software locally etc etc) for ideas on remote installation, workstation imaging/archiving/backups, and in general some type of remote control operation to FIX problems that may happen with not completely locked down workstations (non kiosk mode of operation)
--or use Linux LTSP (linux terminal servers) with XEN or VMware or some other such system to get an easier to monitor client running (a thin client), while still allowing functional and complete operation with your specific applications
--another way of fixing this is to use live cdroms which are of course slow to boot, but at least allow complete interaction locally without the danger of destroying files or systems ?
Example that immediately comes to mind is Novell's Zenworks workstations or servers, of course it mainly will reflect their Suse OS, which is also a very good Linux
--as an example, here is part of their setup documentation
http://www.novell.com/documentation/nld/nld_deployment/data/bt056w8.html
http://www.novell.com/documentation/nld/nld_deployment/data/bvpwo6a.html
--replacing an NT server with linux
http://citnews.unl.edu/linux/LinuxPresentation.html
I personally like Novell and have considered themn the best since their netware days, even against Microsoft's glitzy semi-integration of their own technologies (like exchange, office sharepoint and so on)
--So something like Novells, NDS (e-Directory), Nsure (single sign on, identity control) or more genrally a open source LDAP
BUT FIRST get the infrastructure planning working correctly, maybe do a test lab to run the installation, you don't need many machines to do this (depends on the services you want to try)
--servers, web, mail, directory, security + the number of workstation types you want to use
A) I would also standardise on a workstation type, vendor (and buy all ws from the same with the parts including motherboard fiormware set and processor stepping level specified)
==you could go Dell or some other national supplier or you could get a build quote form some custom builder, amybe even some of the linux builders
Compaq's document on a lights out headless linux install
http://www.linux.com/howtos/Compaq-Remote-Insight-Board-HOWTO/index.shtml
Another enterprise system, is IBM's Tivoli
http://citnews.unl.edu/linux/LinuxPresentation.html
Using Linux to install Linux remotely (scripting needed ?)
http://linux2.arinet.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=135&Itemid=2
--Redhat description installing remotely
http://sourceforge.net/projects/howtorib
PXE boots (network boots)
http://www.kegel.com/linux/pxe.html
--Linux journal article remotely installing Linux
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/5465 |
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vibrokatana Guru
Joined: 09 Feb 2006 Posts: 328 Location: o0o0oo
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Posted: Tue Oct 03, 2006 5:57 am Post subject: |
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I remember seeing awhile back a management system that compared files between a master and the subnotes (actual machines) and would update/maintain the files across the entire system. If I had a large computer base with 200+ identicle machines I would use gentoo and a system like that. Plus system migrations would be relatively painless (if it worked properly)
The only problem I see is setting it so 200+ clients dont ask to download files at the same time, that would defeat the purpose _________________ My Systems - "I suggest the whole thing be coded in whitespace. Henceforth the code will be obscure and functional at the same time." |
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vibrokatana Guru
Joined: 09 Feb 2006 Posts: 328 Location: o0o0oo
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Posted: Tue Oct 03, 2006 5:58 am Post subject: |
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vibrokatana wrote: | I remember seeing awhile back a management system that compared files between a master and the subnodes (actual machines used) and would update/maintain the files across the entire system. If I had a large computer base with 200+ identicle machines I would use gentoo and a system like that. Plus system migrations would be relatively painless (if it worked properly)
The only problem I see is setting it so 200+ clients dont ask to download files at the same time, that would defeat the purpose |
_________________ My Systems - "I suggest the whole thing be coded in whitespace. Henceforth the code will be obscure and functional at the same time." |
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jimstapleton n00b
Joined: 30 Jun 2006 Posts: 28
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Posted: Tue Oct 03, 2006 2:02 pm Post subject: |
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my epxierinece:
When everythign works: Ubuntu is great, easy and relatively fast.
As soon as something breaks, which has happened to me a lot (never got the graphics working properly on my i950), fixing it can be a headache at best.
Gentoo takes longer to setup, but I've found the same thing I've found with BSD - if something breaks, it's a lot easier to fix than with other linux distros. It also has better driver support than BSD, but that's not important to this discussion...
Finally, if you are using older or slower hardware, compiling stuff on Gentoo is more reliable than any other Linux system I've used, especially portage. Also you can distributed compile apparantly, as well as make packages with your compilations - with many systems the time requirements are thus vastly reduced for the compilation steps, most importantly, you can do it once for many systems by making the packages. Lastly, since you can have custom build flags redily available for your system, you can make older or slower working systems run better.
My thoughts on this setup? Give Ubuntu a shot on a sample machine of each configuration - if it works fine on them, keep it. If not, switch to Gentoo, in the short run it'll potentially cost a bit more time/effort, but in the long run it should actually pan out to be a good idea. |
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vibrokatana Guru
Joined: 09 Feb 2006 Posts: 328 Location: o0o0oo
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Posted: Tue Oct 03, 2006 4:52 pm Post subject: |
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how in the world did I quote myself? _________________ My Systems - "I suggest the whole thing be coded in whitespace. Henceforth the code will be obscure and functional at the same time." |
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kenjiru n00b
Joined: 07 Feb 2006 Posts: 41 Location: Romania
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Posted: Tue Oct 03, 2006 8:39 pm Post subject: |
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you should use Ubuntu |
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renrutal Tux's lil' helper
Joined: 26 Mar 2005 Posts: 135 Location: Brazil
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Posted: Tue Oct 03, 2006 8:42 pm Post subject: |
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I'd go with Gentoo personally, it's really the distro that I'm the most used to. But I see you have more than one admin, so there are different opinions and knowledge about everything.
Of course, I wouldn't be an update-happy admin, first I'd download and test it in the build server, then and finally deploy it. Unfortunatelly, most lab admins don't have the patience to plan things before they do them.
Further, I'd look for are automation tools, specially Gentoo-tailored ones. SSH'ing and emerging things manually in a huge lab is a pain. |
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playfool l33t
Joined: 01 Jun 2004 Posts: 688 Location: Ã
rhus, Denmark
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Posted: Tue Oct 03, 2006 9:27 pm Post subject: |
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For minimal maintance why not consider something like CentOS? |
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