Linux, Internet Cafe, Haiti...

[Jamon Camisso]

Robert Brockway wrote:
> 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.

For a server, there is a budget that was decided on by my predecessor 
who jumped ship at the last minute. I can't say what it is, but there is 
enough to build a fairly powerful whitebox (with backup components too) 
with as much RAM as I can stuff in.

>> 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.

Some of the cards were Kingston. The rest I couldn't say as I didn't 
have time to open the boxes today. I'm not sure I ever will for that matter.

>> 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.

I've forgotten how spoiled I've become with grub and such. Etherboot 
sounds like just the tool that is needed to make the whole mess of a 
system work.

>> 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.

Actually, I had thought of it, but as someone else noted, Ubuntu sounds 
like it supports LTSP without any work whatsoever. That being said, I 
suppose there isn't much to an "apt-get install lpst-server" now is 
there. I like Debian more then Ubuntu anyways, so thanks for the tip.

>> 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.

Just switches right? Sounds like any dlink/smc/linksys jobby will do the 
trick just fine. Most hub/switch combinations (home routers I mean?) can 
be put into switch mode as well?

>> 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.

See above ;)

> 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
> 

Nope this is the first time for me. Hopefully the first of many. I've 
looked at and applied to the NetCorps Program, but this came up and I'll 
be done with it before I'm able to participate in a longer (4-6 month) 
program.

Thanks,

Jamon
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