Extramadura: gnuLinEx and NBD

So obviously I already knew that the region of Extramadura uses a version of Debian they call gnuLinEx, but I didn't know the specifics. As such, it was nice and interesting that they offered us the option of going to a local school, where we could see an installation of gnuLinEx in action. Obviously I went there.

This was an interesting experience, for sure. When I arrived in Cáceres, I learned from Vagrant Cascadian that the school installations make extensive use of LTSP. This, in turn, uses NBD. Since they run this on 80.000 computers, it's quite likely that they're the largest NBD installation in the world. I had no clue.

So, today, when noticing that nbd-client was used on the local machines, I had a short little chat with José, one of the guys from gnuLinEx who's a Debian Developer, about the fact that I've been wanting to do some work on NBD's performance (mostly profiling runs etc), but that I don't have the setup to do this efficiently. To keep a long story short: I now have a test lab the size of which is several times the country I live in. Whee.

I had my camera with me, and took some pictures. I'll upload them soon, but have some other, more urgent, matters to attend to now (such as 'eat').

Later.