Linux, Internet Cafe, Haiti...

[Robert Brockway]

On Sun, 8 Jan 2006, Jamon Camisso wrote:

> I'm going to be setting up an internet cafe in Haiti next month. The project

Cool.  We're doing a number of thin client installs at the moment, 
including one in Jamaica for an Internet cafe.

> I checked out all the donated hardware for the cafe today and found that 
> there are about 10 working computers, ranging from 486dx's to 300mhz 
> celerons. The machine with the most ram I could find had 64mb. With this in

I hope you don't mean for the server.  Realistically a modern XTerminal 
will want at least 64Mb ram.  128 or 256Mb is much more desirable.  With 
anything less than 256Mb expect to need to swap across the network (which 
slows things down a lot).  This ia mainly a result of the demands modern X 
clients like firefox place on the Xserver process (running on the thin 
client).

Find more ram for the server.

> Most of the computers came from the Canadian Government, with NT4.0 and the 
> dx'es from the University of Ottawa with Novell something or other and 
> Win3.1. All the computers have network cards, some with co-ax and others not. 
> All are ISA of course.

Yay.  Just pray they don't use isaPnP.  That never worked properly.

> My first question then: how hard will it be to get the computers to boot from 
> the network and how much (if at all) will their aging components affect both 
> their access to the server and operations on the server itself?

As others have noted a network boot capability is unlikely on the older 
hardware.  You probably want to look at Etherboot for booting the boxes 
from floppy.

> My second question, which arises in part from the first: which distro(s) 
> would work well in this proposed environment? My immediate thought is 
> something like Fedora, SuSE, Ubuntu etc. My reasons for this are in part due 
> to the fact that I'll be remotely checking in and troubleshooting and am 
> familiar with those three distros, both as server and as desktop.

Well I prefer Debian, including in situations like this but any full 
featured distro will be fine for the server.  Use your favourite.

> My third question: what type of network would work best? The cafe will 
> have a satellite connection and will be carrying multiple voip 
> connections for international calls. For most users speed will not be 
> much of an issue since in the area I'll be working (just outside 
> Jacmel), there is absolutely no internet or international call 
> capability, so anything is better than nothing.

You mean for the LAN?  As fast as you can make it.  100MBit switches are 
cheap as chips here so put a couple and lots of Cat5e cable in your 
suitcase.

> I'll try to make it out to the meeting this week? if anyone feels like 
> giving me any advice or pointers.

I'm not sure if you've done anything like this before but the key is to 
put gobs of ram in the server.  A decent cpu in the server is nice too but 
not as important as lots and lots of ram.

Based on the hardware you mention above even the server isn't going to be 
terribly powerful.  If you need to spread the users across a couple of 
servers you could look at clustering or you could offer a "chooser" to 
allow users to log into different servers.

Rob

-- 
Robert Brockway B.Sc.		Phone:	+1-416-669-3073
Senior Technical Consultant	Email:	support-wgAaPJgzrDxH4x6Dk/4f9A at public.gmane.org
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