[Lancaster] Prep for next meeting.

[Martyn Welch]

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On Thursday 08 Jan 2004 13:40, you wrote:
> On 2004.01.08 11:05, Martyn Welch wrote:
> > Hi all,
> >
> > Last October it must have been, I was able to get hold of a car load
> > of
> > Pentium based machines to possibly replace some of the older PC's on
> > the
> > folly / increase the number of machines that were available. From
> > discussions
> > at the time I think Taylor felt comfortable with the number of
> > machines that
> > were there already.
> >
> > Since many of the boxes were near identical inside (as well as
> > outside) I
> > think the concensus was that replacing some of the old machines with
> > these,
> > to improve performance and aesthetics.
>
> Sounds like a good idea, if they're better than the ones we have
> already. Though the performance of the clients isn't that important
> unless we're trying to do some kind of distributed processing thing.
>

Agreed, although newer hardware maybe a little more resilient to breaking down 
and we might as well use it since we have it!

> > At the time I think it was thought that doing this work at a separate
> > time
> > would be preferable, rather than taking up all of the next few lug
> > meetings
> > do it. I have however been very busy of late and have neglected to
> > find any
> > time to do this / remember very little about what we had planned to
> > do.
>
> If I find the energy (I have loads of time...), I'll get started on
> this b4 the meeting.
>

Great! I'm guessing that the best course of action would be to decide on a 
distro and use one of the old machines as a ftp server or NFS server (pref. 
one of the faster ones with a reasonable size HD) and create a local mirror.  
This should speed up installation once we get 5-6 machines installing at 
once!

> > Has anyone done any work on these machines / can anyone remember what
> > the
> > plans were? Are we going to install mandrake on them as we did with
> > the last
> > lot? At one point there was some talk of installing Debian on them as
> > this
> > may provide a stronger platform in terms of maintainence with them
> > being used
> > as thin clients.
>
> My vote's for debian. but that's just because it's what I'm used to at
> home. Debian does have some programs for managing multiple identical
> installations over the net, which might be useful.
>

I'm happy to use debian if everyone else is...

Do these tools allow you to save the list of packages installed on one machine 
and replicate them in a second install (if so Mandrake has something 
similar). That would greatly ease installation!

We also need to think of some way to create a backup for the machines so that 
they can be quickly restored to a default setup if things go wrong in the 
future to save loads of time having to be spent reinstalling. It might be 
worth installing on a single partion with a second equal sized partion for 
creating a image of the drive - if anything goes wrong use a rescue disk and 
write the mirror over the primary partion.

> > Either way it would be worth setting up a machine at the folly to
> > work
> > as a
> > distro mirror, for which ever distro we are to use, get some boot
> > disks
> > prepared so that we can get them all installing roughly at the same
> > time at
> > the start of the next meeting if no other time is going to become
> > available.
> > Does anyone have any experience with installing debian from a network
> > mirror?
> > - from memory this is the default method.
>
> I had to do this to reinstall my CD-less debian server the other day,
> and it wasn't difficult - just mount the iso of the first disk as a
> loopback in the ftp directory of a machine running proftpd, and copy
> the 6 network boot floppy images onto floppy, then go through the
> installation.
>

I think it would be preferable if one of the old machines was setup with a 
copy of the software on the HD, once we get a number of computers 
simultaneously installing the CD would become a major bottleneck! 

Also would downloading from a mirror on the web may get us an updated version, 
or have you got a copy of the latest stable release on CD? A CD would be 
quicker to copy to the HD than an external mirror.

> There are a couple of ideas I had about things that could be done in
> this space, which I would like to talk about at the meeting - the main
> idea was to make it so there is an easy way for people to move data
> from their home machines to a server at the folly which can be accessed
> from that room. This way, people who have computers at home but, like
> me, sometimes get bored of always working on projects by themselves in
> the house, could go into the folly and have the same data available
> there, with there being some way of making sure that the two were kept
> synchronised. I've been looking into a distributed filesystem called
> coda, which has been developed at cmu (http://www.coda.cs.cmu.edu/)
> university in the states, which might be able to do this, but more low
> tech solutions might be just as good (even just an ftp server would be
> a help.) Any thoughts on this welcome. The idea is that room could
> become a place for people to do computer stuff (could be programming,
> websites, music/video/graphics or web browsing/email) and be able to
> share ideas and ask for help with problems, rather than be working at
> home which I sometimes find quite isolating.
>

I guess this would have to be discussed with Taylor, this would be server side 
stuff and would also have to be live on the web. I would bend towards OpenSSH 
(ssh, scp, sftp...) rather than ftp as ftp sends plain text passwords and is 
thus a security risk...

> Another idea is to run a course on installing and using linux, maybe
> through the adult college.
>

Sounds cool, however it might be a little short for a course and would be a 
lot of work and commitment.

> andy.

Martyn
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