Consensus seems to be building Hardy Heron slow as molasses

[Kai Wollweber]

Hello,

i am a long term LSTP user but new to ubuntu and to this list. Hopefully we 
got the right decision to change to edubunt's LTSP 5. Thanks in advance to 
the people affiliating LTSP to a distribution. You are doing a great job!

On Saturday 03 May 2008 18:12:06 Todd O'Bryan wrote:
> My guess is that most of us don't have extra systems to run the beta
> releases on and can't afford to take the chance of having a system go
> down when there are 6 or 10 or 30 schoolchildren depending on it. 

Irrespective of the possibility to make beta tests, we made the experience 
that even small system changes can affect the production use - say the 
classroom users.

Therefore we decided to have redundant systems. As a school with 80 terminals 
for more than 800 students it is a must to have redundancy. Otherwise no 
changes can be made outside periods of holidays.

Actually we use three secondary servers for xdm plus one of two servers as 
main server with the LTSP 4.2. for pxe, tftpboot, nfs, nis, cups and other 
services. The second main server usually is in standby in case of hardware 
damage of the first one. If one of the secondary servers failes, the other 
two will take over the sessions.

The second main server and one of the three secondary servers actually are 
used to setup the LTSP 5 system. Main issues for changing from LTSP 4.2 to 
LTSP 5 are use of usb sticks and sound on the terminals. 

Experiments with Opensuse and kiwi-ltsp were not successful. We hope that 
edubuntu 8.04 now is the best choice.

We had some problems with the installation on amd64 server with i386 clients: 
The installation of the packet ltsp-client-core failed because the 
file /etc/ltsp_chroot is missed. Finally we got the system running.

But we are not sufficient with the clients yet. There is still some work of 
finetuning to do before we can switch over from testing to production.

One problem is performance. Login is somewhat slow but acceptable. The windows 
on the client behave different: terminal windows react quickly, but other 
windows, e.g. from open office or firefox are slow. I did not observe this on 
LTSP 4.2. Could it be an effect of ssh on clients with small cpus?  

-- 
Kai Wollweber
Integrierte Gesamtschule
Eckernförde