Using Casper Distribution Points

[ducharmec]

Our district is currently beginning the process of migrating our imaging
and software package need to Casper. I was wonder if any of the larger
districts that are using this software have distribution points in the
schools? If so what kind of hardware are you using? Has any one tried
using the Mac Mini's? Thanks for your input.

Cynthia R. DuCharme

Technical Support SpecialistHelpdesk Support

VM 763-391-7221

[#2]

Cynthia,
We have a lot (62) distribution points. Variety of boxes, some 10.4.11 servers on Dual-G4 towers, some Mac Mini's and Mac Pros and G5 towers and G5 Xserves and Intel Xserves, most are 10.5. One runs SMB and that works OK, but doesn't sync automatically like the other distribution points. My main concern is having enough hard drive space as our CasperShare grows rapidly, at least 100 GB without CS4. . .. .

Most of the remote dist. points also provide NetBoot and SWUS to that building. Our between building connection is 10Mb so that is why so many. If that pipe was bigger I could get by with fewer servers.

The new MacMini's look promising because of a couple things.
4GB RAM, 320GB hard drive, can add USB/FW external.
use much less power to run than a Xserve or MacPro. especially since it is idle a lot. 12W idle for Mac Mini
143W idle for Mac Pro tower
158 W idle for Xserve
http://www.apple.com/environment/resources/environmentalperformance.html

For distribution needs, it doens't have to be that fast and even though a Mac mini isn't as reliable/expandable as a Tower or Xserve, if it crashes, it is not hard to replace. Nothing critical on that remote distribution point.

That's what I think, at least.
-Nathaniel
SPPS

[Casper] Using Casper Distribution Points

DuCharme, Cynthia (ESC) to:
casper
06/04/2009 11:18 AM

[tlarkin]

I have 5 buildings with about 900 to 1300 laptops in each of them. Each
building has both a Mac mini and an Xserve. The Xserve is the main
distribution point and also the netboot/imaging server for that building
since we don't want to image over the WAN.

We do have Mac Minis in the smaller computer labs and middles schools
where there are less macs deployed, and they do work fine. You have to
load OS X server on them though to get past the 10 client limit of AFP
connections.

Overall, the Xserves make all the difference. At first we just had mac
minis, now that we have both running and load balancing enabled I get
policy pushed out notably faster. I also had my boss buy me the most
top of the line Xserve last year for our JSS and it has 8gigs of RAM in
it.

Minis will work, but if you are unicasting policies to 1000s of laptops
an xserve is much much better. Plus if you try to netboot/image off a
Mac mini, forget about it. You'll be there for days imaging just a few
machines. I have not tried multi casting with a Mini though, and I
wonder how that would work out?

Hope that helps

Tom

---

Thomas Larkin
TIS Department
KCKPS USD500
tlarki at kckps.org
blackberry: 913-449-7589
office: 913-627-0351

[dustydorey]

We have about a half dozen sharepoints set up here, all of our
sharepoints are on either XServe hardware or MacPros. They are all
running 10.4 server or 10.5 server and we will be migrating to 10.6
after summer. And we will be adding a couple more this summer I believe.

Whether or not you need them all depends on how often you plan on
imaging simultaneously in the cases of a few of our sharepoints it was a
matter of the hardware already being owned and not being used so it was
a no brainer.

In terms of buying new hardware, we've found that if you are planning on
imaging A LOT (we imaged about 3k last summer, and most likely more this
summer) then I would think it would behoove you to try and isolate your
JSS. For instance have your JSS and main sharepoint essentially be
just a JSS then set up a different server to be netboot and point most
of your machines at that ones Sharepoint as their main distribution
point. If buildings don't want to want to coordinate with you on
imaging then I would tell them they would need to have a sharepoint of
their own, and you could set them up as a netboot too so then you
wouldn't have to deal with router configuration. But then everytime you
update your netboots you will have to update them as well.

There are a lot of variables. Feel free to let me know if you want
more info or you can give me a call or what not. We're just down the
road!

-Dusty-

Dustin Dorey

Technology Support Cluster Specialist

Independant School District 196

Rosemount-Apple Valley-Eagan Public Schools

dustin.dorey at district196.org

651|423|7971

[John_Wetter]

We have the following setup:
Intel XServe w/8GB RAM running only the JSS
PPC XServe w/8GB RAM running Netboot and Master package store for the whole district except the High School (serves about 3200 computers)
Dual 2GHz G5 PowerMac running Netboot and remote package store for our High School (serves about 1000 computers)

The restriction you'll hit with minis will likely be disk throughput in larger buildings.

All of our buildings are connected via fiber making centralization easier.

Thanks,
John

--
John Wetter
Technology Support Administrator
Educational Technology, Media & Information Services
Hopkins Public Schools
952-988-5373

[#6]

Not sure if this helps or not.
We just put in a new Xserve for the JSS. 2 x 2.93 Quad-Core CPU's. 24GB RAM.
Connected via Gigabit (Link Aggregation between 2 Gigabit ports).

Yesterday we were imaging 30 Intel iMacs with about a 60GB image. The
throughput hit about 120MB/s with the average being 80MB/s. During that
time CPU utilization sat around 10% (out of 100%).

Point being that, in terms of imaging (with unicast), you are most likely
going to max out the network throughput before you max out the CPU or RAM.

I'm not sure how it will preform during the school year with all the
policies, check-ins, and recons happening. (We have around 2500 clients)
--
Brad Rellinger
Technology Specialist
Anthony Wayne Local Schools K-12
aw_aca_bre at nwoca.org

[dhowell]

Has anybody tried a NFS share, We were told it wasn't supported but could work. We have Several Linux Servers we could use and no free MAC servers

D. Trey Howell ? ACMT, ACPT, ACDT, ACHDS
trey.howell at austinisd.org
Desktop Engineering

[tlarkin]

There is an open source version of AFP that you can load on your Linux
servers.

http://alexthepuffin.googlepages.com/

I have only read about it. I did in previous times use the open source
protocol for apple talk back in the day when I was tinkering around with
Linux boxes and it seemed to work OK.

Let us know how it works if you try it. Seems to be backed by FUSE
which is an open source project of Google I think. So it should have
decent backing and support.

---

Thomas Larkin
TIS Department
KCKPS USD500
tlarki at kckps.org
blackberry: 913-449-7589
office: 913-627-0351

[#9]

I've been looking into netatalk (I think) a while ago for a distro point. It's open source afp. Throw that on linux and setup the accounts and you should be good to go.

Ryan Harter
UW - Stevens Point
Workstation Developer
715.346.2716
Ryan.Harter at uwsp.edu

[dhowell]

We tried Netatalk a while back and with a big environment we had huge issues.I am going to test the other though thanks....

D. Trey Howell ? ACMT, ACPT, ACDT, ACHDS
trey.howell at austinisd.org
Desktop Engineering
414-0102
twitter @aisdmacgeek