St. Maurice School wrote:
I toyed with the idea of running thin clients and terminal server, but decided against it because if the point of failure is the server itself, everyone is out of business, while if each loads the os then a point of failure, on the server, will still allow clients to do "Some Things"
comments, disagreements? I am open to thoughts/ridicule
We have a couple of schools running either LTSP or another thin client package called nymph within our LEA, as well as one with citrix. The server going down isnt really a problem as all you need to do is either setup load balancing or use an NFS style roll over. The issues (and possible solutions) I have with thin clients are: Network Performance: Large scale thin client networks are very traffic intensive, so you need to do a full audit and analysis of your network before even considering it. CPU power: Even a P2 has an incredible amount of power, that a thin client system such as LTSP just wont use, Nymph can as can Shaolin Aptus, a commercial product. Data Redundancy: LTSP uses NFS, Nymph uses Cluster NFS. IF your network goes down for any reason, or even just glitches slightly, say goodbye to your data. LUSTRE or Open AFS both offer solutions to this, so does Aptus; but LUSTRE is very new, Open AFS is a black art and Aptus costs. Multimedia: Sound is possible - just, anything else forget about it, and anything else that is even slightly cpu intensive even with extensive load balancing. Mixed networks, with medium or fit clients are a much better idea, but still have a number of limitations and the only free package capable of running medium cliens is Nymph. Also Nymph will only work with SuSE upto 8.2, and thats only because we payed for it to be ported. The developers, Fen Systems are a mandrake house. A further alternative might be a system which has just been developed by Owen LeBlanc at Manchester Computing, its a 4 1/2 Meg Debian install which pulls down and caches locally any requested package. I tried to break it by starting Open Office on 20 machines without any luck and is being installed on 3,500 machines at Manchester University later on this year. The system does use AFS however, and there are bound to be problems with implimenting it that I will never see, and given Owen's status as a Guru and Kernel Hacker, will never occur for him. If your still considering some kind of thin client network after all that, do take a look at Aptus. If you can afford it, it solves about 90% of the problems with TCN's, and ties in with just about every thin client solution I've seen. Regards, Ben