tlug: Linux on the university Win LAN

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <turnbull@example.com>]

>>>>> "Tony" == Tony Laszlo <laszlo@example.com> writes:

    Tony> The classroom has about 60 Fujitsu computers (probably about
    Tony> 5-6 years old) which all run Windows 95. I suppose they are
    Tony> connected with an NT LAN. They take a very long 5 minutes or
    Tony> so to boot up, as the computer first goes through some kind
    Tony> of scanning process and then asks for the user to login.

Are you sure that's not just an ordinary boot?  I wouldn't expect
modern Linuxes to boot any faster out of the box on old machines.
What you need to do is strip out all the crud that modern distros put
in.  Lots of work.  And you would still want to do that even if you
were going to use an NFS-root boot floppy.

    Tony> Anyway, I'm wondering if it might be possible get a more
    Tony> stable situation going by sticking in a floppy and getting
    Tony> Linux running.

No, since you can't store permanently to the hard drive.  You'll need
an NFS server, which (if there's any load at all) will have to be
pretty high-performance.  Sure, you could probably make pretty good X
terminals out of those boxes, but where are you going to get the
server?  (If they're X terminals, the server would also have to run
the Netscape client, etc.)

You'd also find setup pretty troublesome; you would surely want to
create a swap file on the hard drive and stuff like that.  Tuning all
those things sounds pretty painstaking to me.

    Tony> Assuming no cooperation on the part of the university (other
    Tony> than information regarding the IP addresses of the machines)

    Tony> * will I be able to get Linux running from a floppy and
    Tony> utilizing the NT LAN properly (will I be able to get Lynx to
    Tony> function, for example)?

Technically, it shouldn't be a problem.  (Well, assuming that those
old Fujitsus are pretty close to a true PC clone, which may not be all
that good a bet.)

But it won't work from a single floppy.  You'll need a minimum of an
NFS server, since you can't boot from Samba as a far as I know.  You
could theoretically then shift the file serving load to the NT server
using smbclient and the Samba file system, but not without cooperation
from the University.

    Tony> * is running X and Netscape out of the question?

No, but it will be very tight given that Windows 95 + Netscape doesn't
work well.

You could try this with just a single-floppy system, but I would
strongly recommend trying to get the cooperation of the University to
establish servers you could use.

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