LTSP Advice

[Brian Kelsay]

Bill Cavalieri's company sets this stuff up for schools and small businesses.  You might want to 
ask him.

I would build a beefy server and a mirrored backup.  If the server is down, no one can work.  I 
would also keep a few LiveCDs, like Knoppix, around in case both servers are down.  I would have 
the desktops boot from CD instead of floppy as it is faster.  It's not too hard to build an iso and 
include the boot files needed.  Nero can do it as well as other programs.  If you are leaving off a 
HDD, then it might not be too bad to have both floppy and CD drives avail.  You could also get 
everyone a USB memory stick or get a handful of them anyway to ease moving files around.  Maybe the 
best choice overall would be to have a CDRW Drive on one PC and a spindle of disks around at all 
times.

Gerald is right about the networking.  Like he needed anyone to backup his cred.  You can run it 
off of 10Mb hardware, but it will be painful if the OS image is big.  I would say 100Mb is minimum, 
but why not spring for a Gigabit switch for the internal network.   There are some modern 
motherboards that come with Intel 10/10/1000 NICs and those are pretty good.  Might want to gather 
info on which gigabit NICs work w/ Linux, but Intel and 3Com models should be working.  Run new 
copper.

Brian Kelsay