Creating Home Directories for students of different groups on SAN
 

Hi All,
I need a help from you. I am having 6 servers and one SAN storage at one of my customer place which are being installed at site. The problem is being an engineering institute, customer wants their students (no of students will be around 1000) should be able to save their work on their home directories which has to be created on the SAN storage. These 1000 students are divided into years (1st yr, 2nd yr, 3rd yr) and branch (electrical, mechanical, computer sc etc.). Till this it was ok, but the problem is on each server there will be different application based on RHEL and students of different year’s and branch will be connecting from their labs to accomplish their jobs and they will save their results on their home directories on the SAN storage. Now as far as I know that at any point of time only one LUN can be mapped to any server in R/W mode. Here I have to make available the home directories to all students of different groups working on different servers. How to resolve this issue – please help.

What about creating a lun for each server.

Cheers

OK then should I create all 1000 home directories in all the LUNs?

If you want the data on the lun accessible to all servers, the simplest is to make one of the servers a NFS server and export the data to all the other servers. This includes the home directories of the students.

But you did not tell all of it.
How are the students accessing the different servers? Do the login directly or are they using some sort of remote access, like putty, ssh, telnet.
What kind of applications are we talking about. Server applications like apache, mysql. Or more like executables they start after they logged in on the servers.
Also if the students are logging into the servers you probably want a centralised authentication system like LDAP/Kerboros, otherwise you need to sync those 1000 students over 6 servers.


Man, I really miss my VMS clusters. Life was so much simpler then. :)

Hi,

Thank you for your reply. Few software, customer has mentioned - Matlab, Scilab, Oracle,PIECESPICE, Network Simulator etc. Among these servers one server they want to create video streaming server for their internal student like YouTube. Moreover for video streaming they are requesting for any free software - I have checked many, including Darwin but unable to understand which one should be more applicable for this case. Customer will be downloading videos from youtube and other sources for their students and professors (format may be any)and store it on the Streaming Server. Need your help on the same.