Hans Witvliet said the following on 05/14/2013 03:24 AM:
I was wondering, there are several ways to separate the machine where storage for home directories are provided from the place where it is needed. This is needed in case you have multiple (virtual) desktop machines, where a number of people could log in.
You really ought to look at the Linux Terminal Server Project. They have been doing that for a long while and know all the permutations. Yes you'll have people here suggest various ways, automounter, nfs, cifs and more, the LTSP has "Been There Done That" and rung all the changes. They have a "fire and forget" package and various customizations and lots and lots of advice based on actually practice rather than theory. http://www.ltsp.org/ Its sort of "how thin do you want your clients to be?" I once tried the LXE route based on what comes with Suse and after a while I fund it was just too fiddly to set everything up so I turned to LTSP and "It Just Works". As I say, lots of people here will tell you how to do it with Suse. They are 100% correct. You will find it a "learning experience" as I did. Another project I worked on might be of interest. Essentially is was a Linux version of CITRIX. The technology is more often called "VDI' In effect is the 21st century version of X-Terminals. Back years ago USENIX conferences would have a terminal room with lots of X-terminals where you could 'call home'. These were X display machines, the X version of "dumb terminals". In case you don't know, the X protocol is the other way round fro the way MS-Windows works. The display engine/terminal is just that. The program runs 'remotely' and sends the display codes over a comms line. It could be a TCP link or just a 1200 baud modem link. You can google for VDI and find out more about the various ways this has been done. Like the LTSP there are variations n how much is remote and how much is local. One extreme is, as you hint, complete virtual machines doing everything except display. That being said, there are hints that the way systemd is heading will support "multiple seats". Whether that means multiple video cards, keyboards and mice plugged into a single box I don't know. I do know that for a long time UNIX has been doing on one box, possibly chrooted, what it takes many virtual instances of MS-Windows to do: dns, dhcp, smtp and more -- and all without needing virtualization. So it might be that the 'multi-seat' is really a GUI version of what we were doing with PDP-11s back in the 70s and 80s, that is having many terminal plugged in to one box and many people logged in simultaneously and making use of the multi-processing and process separation capabilities of UNIX. Now, with Linux and things like CGROUPS we have better control over that separation and resource management than we ever had with the PDP-11 and the VAX :-) And that kind of management is where the facilities that systemd is addressing is why the multi-seat looks so interesting. -- I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: "O Lord, make my enemies ridiculous." And God granted it. --Voltaire -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org