the Configured Workstations will be running Ubuntu GNU/Linux, initially release 5.10 (breezy badger).

They should be capable of having the Required Astronomical Software installed on them, but not every workstation needs all the different tools.

Authentication Model

The workstations should use PAM to authenticate against the CAL Kerberos Domain

Prototyping

A prototypical configured workstation will be set up and given over to try to install the Required Astronomical Software. We're calling this the Proto-CW

Partitioning Scheme

We'll use LVM. here's the proposed partitioning scheme:

Base disk is broken into two partitions:

• /dev/sda1 is a small (200MB) partition for /boot
• /dev/sda2 is everything else, and will be a physical volume (the only physical volume in the primary volume group for the machine)

The primary volume group will have these logical volumes:

• root is a ~1GB volume mounted at /
• usr is a ~4GB volume mounted at /usr
• var is a ~4GB volume mounted at /var
• swap is a ~1GB volume used for swap space
• the rest will be mounted as a scratch partition somewhere reasonable (like /usr/local/scratch)

temporary space

i'm inclined to mount /tmp as a RAM-backed filesystem. Since all RAM is actually backed by swap, this is reasonable, and it means that /tmp will be nicely auto-flushed on a reboot. An example line in /etc/fstab for such a method would look like this:

tmpfs /tmp tmpfs size=300m,mode=1777,nosuid,nodev 0   0