Tyan Toledo i965R S5180

I know TYAN is a little off-topic for LXer, but bear with me...

I do LTSP. I think it is the greatest thing since sliced raisin bread ;-). The cheapest way to do LTSP is to take a good desktop PC, add memory, RAID storage, and perhaps a gigabit/s NIC. The cost of a good AMD64 box set up like this is $1000 to $1500 and it can easily handle 50 thin clients in 4 GB RAM. That is only $30 per client. You can set up a cluster of these machines to server more clients, but everything gets more complicated: LDAP, NFS, e-mail, storage bottlenecks etc. I keep wanting to make things simpler by having one hot machine instead of serveral ordinary boxes.

This is where TYAN comes in. They make some fantastic dual and quad-socket mobos. Look at this baby: ftp://ftp.tyan.com/img_mobo/i_s3992.tif .

The AMD64 product has matured, Intel has caught up, and AMD is rumoured to be cutting prices, again... http://theinquirer.org/default.aspx?article=38465 , 500GB drives are affordable, RAM is reasonable (even ECC registered).

I am thinking my next project will have a real server with dual X2 2.4gHz Opteron SocketF, about 8GB DDR2 RAM, quad 500GB SATA and dual gb NICs with another for the Internet connection. About $5000 should serve 150 and be way easier to maintain than the cluster of cheaper servers and it can be extended a bit by adding more RAM! I will splurge and get a redundant power supply to ease my conscience over less redundancy.

Would this not be a cool setup for a school using LTSP?

If you want to do it cheap, do what I did. Scour for companies with redundant servers. Especially with the virtualization hype there are lots of unused servers around. I got a 2003-ish Dual Xeon 3.2 Ghz for only a couple of hundred euro.

> Scour for companies with redundant servers.

While I've never done so, I understand that Ebay is a good source for such used equipment.

Sander wrote: " I got a 2003-ish Dual Xeon 3.2 Ghz for only a couple of hundred euro."

2003 is a bit old fashioned. I have seen AMD64 X2 3800 (2gHz) using 20% CPU with 1400 processes running. I do not think the Xeon does much more than that at the higher clock speed. I prefer the memory management of the AMD64. The CPU and all peripherals can run full speed. I think this is the year I can justify near-cutting-edge AMD64/Opteron on performance/$. It's only anecdotal, but I recall a report on a Xeon LTSP setup ("A Computer Lab without Windows" see http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/7418 ). My Athlon 2500 was faster for loading programmes like OpenOffice even though he had SCSI 320 and I had ATA133. That author spent $4000 on his machine. Mine cost $1000.

The Xeon boxes are no doubt reliable, but I need performance and scalability. I would like to have it all in one box.

I know, but unfortunately my boss didn't have any unused Dual AMD64 servers lying around :-)