On Oct 13, 2005, at 10:38 AM, Joern Clausen wrote:

> Does anyone has any figures on performance of a mid-sized network of
> diskless clients? If I have 20-30 modern PCs (lots of RAM, local swap
> partition might be possible), is a single, equally modern PC  
> sufficient
> as boot and file server (client roots, maybe swaps, shared /usr)? How
> many clients are possible/reasonable? Or is the potential  
> bottleneck the
> network itself?

I would think the single PC would be fine.  Even Long Long Ago, I had  
a lab of 20 HP 700 workstations (running HP-UX) using a single HP  
9000/433 (running NetBSD) as a home directory server.

If you're worried about a network bottleneck (which I think is a  
reasonable thing to worry about), then consider using a "workgroup  
switch" that has a Gig-E port for the file server and 10/100 ports  
for the clients.

-- thorpej