Changing a company from 100% Windows to 100% FreeBSD.

Vulpes Velox kitbsdlists at HotPOP.com
Mon Nov 17 14:07:07 PST 2003


On Mon, 17 Nov 2003 06:27:25 -0800
"Lee Mx" <lee_ver_mx at hotmail.com> wrote:

> I am switching about 40 desktop's running different versions of
> windows over to freebsd.  One of the primary requirements is
> OpenOffice-1.1 and I've always run it locally on my laptop.
> I'm considering running it over the LAN which would mean that
> I suppose that I would NFS mount the binary and do the network
> install.  Could someone who has done this tell me if they
> recommend running it on the network or if it would be better to
> just install it on each of the 40 machines.  This company and
> every user, uses Office daily, especially excel.

Bandwidth is the first thing that comes to mind when having it installed on a
NFS server and having every body run it from there... If you are going to go
this way, my suggestion, if you wish to go this route, is use a gigabit ethernet
card that has atleast one gigabit port on it. Still then the thought sort of
scares me.

> Also if anyone has any other suggestions that would simplify
> anything in the chain from the initial installation to periodic
> upgrading, it would be highly appreciated.
> 
> I'm planning on having a central server that will be cvsuping
> updated sources and ports daily, making world and portupgrade
> -Rruap periodically.  I plan to NFS mount /usr/ports and not
> have local copies to not have to update them. I'm thinking that
> I could then, fairly easily upgrade the other machines by just
> installing the packages when needed.  It could also serve as a
> local repository for updating the operating system or I suppose
> that I could also NFS mount /usr/src and /usr/obj and do an
> installworld to upgrade, too.  Again any opinions, observations
> or suggestion are highly appreciated.  I've never changed
> 100% to FreeBSD before :-)

Becareful with port auto updates. I have had portupgrade occasionally break a
few things, mainly gnome, that required I go back in and do some sym linking to
fix. Could be a good idea to have a system dedicated to testing upgrades...
Another thing that comes to mind that could be real handy for when updating is
to have one system used soley for building and then have the rest fetch it off
that... can't think of any way to automate that thought.


More information about the freebsd-questions mailing list