Too much network activity?

[Jim Christiansen]

Hello David,

I haven't topped the server yet at client log on yet.  It was on my list
though for Tuesday (Monday= day off)

I can tell you that it seems we do have the same problem.  My 9 year old
etherbooting boxes with newer (4 year old) rt8139 nics take 2 minutes to log
on on after the students push enter for their passwords.  I have 25 of these
old boxes.  They are 128 or 256 meg amd k 450s and 500s.

My newer- 4 year old "Computers For BC Schools" that are 1.5 Gighz  and 1
gig ram take 30 seconds to log on.  They are also 10/100 nics.

The etherboot module that I built from Rom-o-matic.com and installed into
the old clients' grub is unchanged.  I did have to specify the tftp
pxelinux.0 for all of the old boxes in the dhcpd-server.conf file for them
to boot.  This took me a little while to sort out.  It just failed without
specifically calling for each mac...  Maybe this has something to do with
it.

The newer boxes just boot fine with the default dhcpd-server.conf...

What I'll do next is specify each client in the /etc/hosts file- this isn't
done yet.  Have you added your clients to the hosts file?

I did add a custom lst.conf file to /var/bla/bla/bla somewhere with the
LDM_DIRECTX=*True* and it made a small difference to boot time.

My server is a 3 or 4 year old twin 64 bit xenon with 6 gigs ram.  It has
never been bogged down before.  Client speeds have always been like
stand-alone systems.  I had not installed flash on the old K12LTSP system
and kept games like Nibbles off of my system.

I am happy with the Ubuntu-ltsp implementation and look forward to setting
up local apps.  What I really want to get running is Roberta Arkiletian's
fl_teachertool up and running.  It is a gem.  I expect we'll get through
this pretty soon- it's just another minor hurdle ;-)

Jim





=================================

Date: Sat, 14 Nov 2009 10:31:12 -0600
From: David Groos <djgroos at gmail.com>
Subject: Re: Too much network activity?
To: Edubuntu Users Group <edubuntu-users at lists.ubuntu.com>
Message-ID:
       <195a0730911140831j3445cba1pdcd7f4217e93e705 at mail.gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"

Seeing Jim's e-mail about his computers being slow to log on is motivating
me to re-post to this previous post.  I'll repeat that since the last few
weeks, students have to wait maybe 2-4 minutes for their log on process to
finish.  I don't think it's worse in the afternoon though--students are less
patient at that time it seems.

I haven't added new software to my LTSP server except for regular updates.
I've had System Monitor on the last week a good bit.  2 things draw my
attention, the first I already mentioned that there is a lot of network
activity even when only 1 TC is booted.  The other is that the 4 CPU's seem
to be maxing out for a few seconds then go to around 60-70% about for 5-10
seconds, then again max out for a few seconds.  When they peg at 100% it
appears that's when another TC or 2 will get further logged in.  I'm not
sure about how much logging in happens during that maxing out period, but
that is when the logging in process seems to get furthered.

I went to the logs, looked at a few but didn't know where to look and
nothing really jumped out to me.  Any thoughts about how to further
troubleshoot this?  Might be related to Jim's TC problems, too, anyone else
experiencing this?

Thanks,
David
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