[TriLUG] microsoft ad

[Magnus]

On 3/4/06, Matthew Lavigne <maillist at shenandoahkennels.net> wrote:
>
> All the switches that I have are GigE, all the system GigE, HW RAID on
> Ultra 160 Enclosures.  I am trying to push the install in less time then
> that, if I can by making the bottleneck the local CPU/Mem.  Plan is to
> go to U320 or FC enclosure.  Working on benching that now to try to
> determine which way to go.


Front-end your kickstart server with squid, and load it up with RAM.  Tune
squid to cache large objects.  You'll likely need to mess with kernel tuning
on the squid box (things like SHMMAX) so that squid can occupy, say, 2GB of
RAM.  The most commonly requested packages will get pulled from memory.

No matter how fast your disk is, pulling from memory is faster.  :-)  If
you're doing a lot of kickstarts, it might be worth it to load a box up with
4-8GB of RAM.

Also look into tuning your gigabit network for jumbo frames, which will
drastically improve network throughput.

At the last place that I was at where I did a lot of kickstarts at a time,
my kickstart server had four GigE adapters that were bonded.  Combine that
with a lot of RAM (remember, you actually have to tune your kickstart server
to USE the RAM), and I could kickstart a bunch of machines at once and not
bottleneck badly at all.