[clue-tech] And now for something completely different

[Roger Frank]

There they are: 25 PCs sitting in the school computer
lab with the Linux prompt.  What will happen when
students show up in two weeks and log in?  It will
be exciting.

The way this ended up is this:
- passwords are through NIS.  They are the only
  map used on the NIS server.  I would have liked to
  have groups managed there also, but the make barfs when
  I include groups in the Makefile.  So I add two lines
  to each /etc/group on each client, one for students
  in period 7 and one for students in period 3.
- student directories are through NFS.  On the server
  there is a /home/students directory which is exported
  read/write and a /home/teachers directory which is
  exported read only (so students can get at assignments
  or data files).  When they log in, they come to life
  in /home/students/p7/username if in period 7 and
  p3/username if in period 3. 
 
All this seems to work.  I am curious to know what kind
of botlenecks there might be when, right after the bell,
25 students all do a startx.  Startx takes an appreciable time
even on a standalone system with local disks -- what about
everyone going over the network to start up?  Guess I'll
find out soon enough.

One little annoyance: these machines dual boot, so out of the
25 it seems that at least one of them reaches "maximal count"
everytime the lot of them is brought up. The ensuing fsck takes
precious class time.  I'd like to figure out how to have a
cron job do the fsck at night and reset the counter that 
otherwise triggers the unwelcomed fsck.

-- 
Roger Frank
rfrank at linuxclassroom.org