A small LTSP network setup

[Faisal]

Hi all,

I am thinking of setting up a small LTSP network consisting of 10-15 
workstations for a local charity. I am coming from the windows terminal 
services / Citrix world and i am very familiar with that side of things 
and my Linux experience is average at best.

So far I have installed these flavours of an LTSP implementation: The 
debianedu based Skolelinux -  www.slx.no and Edubuntu 12.04 in a VMWare 
virtual server and i have been mighty impressed with the ease of install 
of Edubuntu in particular and i think i will go with it. I have been 
able to boot up a couple of thin clients simultaneously for testing 
purposes and all seemed to run fine in my small lan at home. I loved 
some of the built in tools such as Epostes for ease of management.

In terms of hardware, i think we are going for donated/cheap used fat 
clients and have the local apps option for LibreOffice, Firefox etc to 
ease the load on the server. I am also thinking of having an NFS share 
for the /home partition on a separate grey box(if that further helps 
ease the load of the server and makes it run better).

As for the server, there are good deals going on where i am for small 
office servers such as the HP Proliant ML110 G7 with Intel Xeon E3-1220 
/ 3.1 GHz(quad core) and 8 GB of DDR3 1333 mhz RAM(upgradable to 16) and 
7200 rpm HD disc with dual Gigabit NICs. Would something like this be 
suitable for powering the 10-15 workstations or will that be pushing it?

The charity do not have tech savvy staff and i would like a centralized 
user account setup with openldap. But ideally, have a web gui front end 
for user account creations and password resets. I am looking into tools 
such as Gosa2 - https://oss.gonicus.de/labs/gosa/ and Easy LDAP 
management found here: http://www.ldap-account-manager.org/ . I have not 
been successful so far in setting up these tools, but i am still working 
on it. I may ask someone in my local LUG for help with this part if i 
struggle. Does anyone know similar tools?

Apologies for asking too many questions as i am still researching and 
don't have a clear plan yet. Would appreciate you advice and guidance to 
any tool or resource that would help me get answers.

Regards
Faisal

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