Re: [Openuserful-general] Userful for PlayaInfo at Burning Man 2010

[Tim G. <ti...@us...>]

Hi Tom,
Sounds like you'll be eventually looking for a classic public computer 
setup (secure sessions, branding, time-limit management, etc. in 
addition to multiple users per PC).

I'd encourage you to take a look at Userful Desktop
http://www2.userful.com/products/userful-desktop
it is an install DVD based on Fedora, but it does all this and more.

You could also use Userful Multliplier with Ubuntu as you suggest, but 
this would be much more work to get everything setup and it would lack a 
lot of useful features for public computing:

http://www2.userful.com/products/userful-multiplier


As to the PCI backplane, yes this would work in theory, however, 
pragmatically, it will be much more expensive than having 10 * 5-user 
PCs or 8 * 6-user PCs.

The hardware will be much cheaper this way, performance will also be 
better, and you won't run up against kernel device limits (32 input 
devices). Also imagine the chaos if your 50-user computer went down. 
Much better to have more than one point of failure.

Hope this helps!


-- 
Thanks,
Tim
***********************************
Userful Corporation
Tel: 403-289-2177
    866-USERFUL (873-7385)






Jeffrey Johnson wrote:
> Hi Folks,
>
> I have just returned from Burning Man 2009 (burningman.com) and our
> web app project (earth.burningman.com) was co-opted at the last minute
> to run on a bank of 30 terminals used by burning man participants
> during the event. Approx 8000 people registered and used the app
> during the week, and there was often a line 100+ deep to use the
> terminals. There were numerous 'problems' and many 'triumphs', but the
> main issue as I see it, was keeping all the terminals running
> sucessfully. Each was its own hard-driveless pc booted from a live-cd
> of ubuntu or knoppix.
>
> Some (grainy, damn the dust in my iPhone lens) photos here ...
>
> http://www.flickr.com/photos/ortelius/3902049183/
> http://www.flickr.com/photos/ortelius/3902047085/
> http://www.flickr.com/photos/ortelius/3902052969/
>
> For next year, I have been tasked with improving this mess and the
> first major step I would like to take is to consolidate the terminals
> onto as few physical machines as possible, and increase the number of
> user terminals to 50 if possible all with a minimal budget.
>
> So, I would like to solicit advice from this list on setting up a 50
> instance userful multiplier setup. Is it possible to actually run 50
> (maybe 32 max?) terminals from one VERY large server with a 16x PCI
> port replicator like this
> http://www.cyclone.com/products/expansion_backplanes/pcie412403.php
> with 16 dual head cards in it? If not, what would be the minimum
> number of machines required to do 50 terminals, and how would one go
> about this?
>
> Thanks in advance?
>
> Jeff
>
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