Fablab Wageningen Computers and Infra

NURDspace Project
Participants	Dennis, Fwd
Skills	Basic pc hardware, Sysadmin stuff
Status	Planning
Niche	Software
Purpose	Infrastructure
Tool
Location
Cost
Tool category

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What is this project?

We are going to setup a network and some workstations for Fablab Wageningen. To keep things maintainable we've come up with various possible solutions from which the following (Plan A) seems the most practical.

Plan A

• Plaatje, todo

The server hosts an image which gets deployed to the workstations every night.

Server

• RAID1
• 2 NICS, 1 to internet and 1 to internal network switch
• Firewall
• DHCP server
• TFTPd
• Something to do nightly deploys with, e.g. Clonezilla
• Scripting and a daily cron job at night

Other functionality

• Network disk for users

Clients

• Netboot enabled
• Local harddisk which is big enough for the image

The Image

• One 'fablab' user
• Labmanager user with more rights
• Lots of applications preinstalled
• Possible to modify without too much hassle (automatic updates?)

Network

• Gigabit switch (we could start with 100MBit and change it later)

Daily cycle

At night

Workstations will boot (Wake on LAN), load software from the server which puts a fresh image on the local disk.

Outside nightly window

When workstations are turned on (by hand, typically somewhere during the day) they will load some simple script which tells them to boot from local disk.

Thing to find out first

• What distro do we chose for the clients?
• Is it possible to put the server in the rack?

Plan B

We just pre-install the workstations and do regular maintenance on them.

Plan C

We run a server and use our workstations as thin clients (citrix like scheme). Linux Server Terminal Project (http://www.ltsp.org/) or alike.

Plan D

Workstation boot a live image (in ram) from the server.

Plan E

Only deploy image to workstation when workstation is borked.

Plan F

Make images from workstation which can be redeployed when needed.

Pros and cons

Pros

todo

Cons

• Settings will be gone the next day (A and D)

Further stuff

This needs to be planned:

• Wireless network (separate network)
• Printing (USB, networked?)
• Windows machines