[Server-devel] Installing XS on server for School District need some help

[Martin Langhoff]

2008/11/25 Josh Totoro <jtotoro at chestercommunitycharter.org>:
> Hello, I am a Tech Specialist for a school district in PA.  There are 2 of

Welcome to the list! Even if there's a bit of developer chatter, this
is the place to be.

A couple of initial ideas that might help:

 - Are you using the XS 0.5 installer? If not... do! I's done and
released, but I haven't sent out the release announcement formally.
This page has all the rght links:
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/XS_Release_Notes

 - The Dell server you have looks plenty! Two things could be going amiss...

 - One is that the installer has a preset indicating how it will
format the drives, and it defaults to overwriting existing Linux
partitions, but preserving existing Windows partitions. So when it
offers the "how to partition the drive" dialogue, go in and tell it to
nuke Windows.

 - Second - some hardware raid cards don't have drivers built in into
Linux. That can be a bit of a pain -- if that's the case, the
installer won't find any disk to list. If you think that that's the
problem, the fix is to figure out what the exact model of card it is
(if possible drill down to exact chipset), and how to get it going
with Fedora 9.

If the issue is with the RAID card, it might be a better idea to play
with the desktop machines in the meantime. Or plug a simple PCI SCSI
card, or even a SATA card in there (you'll need SATA disks...)

> We plan to have 1500+ XO's on our schools network in the coming year, what
> specs would you recommend for the servers?  We were planning to have 1
> server on each campus, and about 1100+ XO's on the West and 400 on the
> East.  Can 1 server handle 1100+ XO's if it has top of the line specs?

Cool - we're starting to use (and tune) the XS in scenarios with many
laptops. In fact, this development cycle (from now to new year) is
focused on exactly that, so discussion in the last few weeks has been
on scalability.

Some notes (more detail in recent discussions in the archive):

 - RAM is the main concern - ejabberd (one of the key services) grows
significantly iwth large numbers of _connected_ users. 1MB per user is
what we are seeing (we're working on this). That is the main memory
hog but there are other services too, so with 4GB RAM you should be
ok.

 - Budget 2GB of disk space per user for backups.

 - You will _really_ want to use the next release (0.6), planned for
early January which will have various fixes for scaling issues.

> Would you advise us to set up 2 servers on the West and 1 on the East, and
> if so what specs should we have on those machines?

One machine should be enough, and setting up and maintaining a
2-machine installation is a tricky thing.

cheers,



m
-- 
 martin.langhoff at gmail.com
 martin at laptop.org -- School Server Architect
 - ask interesting questions
 - don't get distracted with shiny stuff  - working code first
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