I have been playing around with an idea recently and thought that I might run it past a few of your great minds. (!) I have been getting up to speed with XP and found it to be very reliable and sound, so far. - We have a lot of existing Windows software used for demanding graphical requirements and need to run this on a stable platform. Connecting these graphical computers to RM 2.4 is giving a lot of setup issues. I found a link the otherday, saying how XP can have user configs setup like in NT, ie the 'limited' template can be overwritten. http://www.wown.com/j_helmig/wxppusrm.htm Now, digging through my flagged up forum stuff, I tracked down something from about a month ago which adds another piece to my jigsaw: " Last summer, as an alternative to spending £1200 on a couple of new drives for our netserver (twin 350 PII & 512MB, NT4) I cobbled together a couple of K6-500 (512MB) under SuSE. Logons are via NT4 until next summer, but the files are now served from Linux. The network speed has gone up - W95 logons (including the behemoth scripts) is down from 2 minutes+ to 30 seconds at peak times. Not perception, but a measured improvement only partly accounted for by load sharing ;) Incidentally, the general reliability of the network is right up - and we havn't crashed NT4 once this year (unlike previous years!) Rgards, Paul Ellison " What I am thinking is this: There may be a better method, as this makes add on bits a chore, but, I know that I can use Norton Ghost to create fat-client clones, ie with no RM 'application' build problems, then stream these as complete XP workstations. The problem is that when I verify the global user against that stored on the RM server it will no doubt pick up all the RM tweaks as well. Can I create an intermediary server using some kind of Linux flavour that would authenticate the logon then fetch the user's work files from the RM server which is global to the school? How do I set the XP user configs too, on the Linux box? What does the 'team' think? Best Regards Bruce Miller.
There may be a better method, as this makes add on bits a chore, but, I know that I can use Norton Ghost to create fat-client clones, ie with no RM 'application' build problems, then stream these as complete XP workstations.
The problem is that when I verify the global user against that stored on the RM server it will no doubt pick up all the RM tweaks as well.
Can I create an intermediary server using some kind of Linux flavour that would authenticate the logon then fetch the user's work files from the RM server which is global to the school? How do I set the XP user configs too, on the Linux box?
What does the 'team' think?
Ditch RM connect. Use a Windows 2000 server and two or three Linux boxes instead. Get the Linux machines to do all the things that don't need Windows2000 and use the Windows 2000 machine to do anything that has to be on Windows eg Exchange or MS SQl server, SIMS etc. Windows 2000 server is actually very inexpensive to schools, the expensive bit is XP licences on the clients. If you use thin clients you could get secure access all over the site without any MS "overhead" on these stations then use fat clients with ghost as you suggest in the areas that they are really necessary. For most people most of the time a thin client is fine. Use rdesktop for getting windows sessions on thin client and LTSP or similar for Linux. So you have a site with secure stations everywhere that is in expensive and least dependent on proprietary products. Regards, -- IanL
participants (2)
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Bruce Miller
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Ian