Re: [Tbox-talk] Tbox for public computer lab

[Christoph L. <chr...@la...>]

On Fri, 25 Oct 2002, epsas wrote:

> I am considering using Telemetry Box for a public computer lab I am
> bottom-lining for the student community at the University of Hawai`i.
> I am currently using Redhat 8.0 as the base operating system on these
> machines.


> In short, I am wondering if:
>
>  - A tbox live CD would be capable of providing X11 plus a Gnome2
> desktop environment for a homogenous set of workstations?  [The
> workstations authenticate over NIS (or LDAP) and NFS mount their /home
> directory.  Our workstations are PIII-700Mhz with 128MB of RAM]

A custom live CD would be able to do that. The default Desktop is KDE.
Authentication via NIS/LDAP would require special configurations and
packages.

>  - With UPM, is it possible to build a local binary repository (ala an
> apt source) and perform network installations with custom compiled
> packages?

That functionality is part of upm functionality. upm builds will always
save binaries in /var/upm/binary. Those can be made available on a mirror.
See also the

upm updatemirror

functionality on http://telemetrybox.org/upm

>   o Part of our lab's mandate is to teach University and High School
> student volunteers how to install and maintain Unix machines.  The
> 'fastest' installation procedure for Gentoo I found involves dd'ing a
> bzip2 compressed image of the raw block device over ssh (we have a
> homogenous network of P-IIIs).  While this method may be less
> time-consuming than a redhat kickstart, I felt this was not a suitable
> introduction to GNU/Linux installations for newbies.

SSH will slow you down because encryption wastes a lot of resources. Try
doing the iso via a native RSYNC connection instead.

>   o "Bootstrapping" Gentoo + X11 + Gnome2 + Gimp is time consuming -
> we did not want to run SysAdmin training sessions over the span of two
> days.

uPM can handle a mixes system partially build from source or prebuild.
You may want to prebuild the big binaries and let the users build the
smaller pieces so that they can learn how to build from source.

> The current Redhat configuration is adequate; providing a modicum of
> functionality for our users, and an acceptable ease of maintenance for
> our admins.  The keywords are 'modicum' and 'acceptable'.  Redhat's
> distribution historically suffers from a list of problems that are
> only partly alleviated by apt-rpm and other third-party tools.

I would be glad about any feedback or suggestion on how to improve uPM.