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Login/Become a Member! | 120 Comments
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Re: Another Important Point
(Score: 1, Interesting)
by Anonymous on Feb 04, 2005 - 05:20 PM
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Matthew, I agree with you 100% that any "experienced and qualified" linux administrator is going to use a thin client environment.
I do however disagree with using LTSP to achieve that goal. LTSP is a complex environment and it is also
fragile and is difficult to deploy. I run a 500 desktop deployment with 4 linux terminal servers which are nothing but redhat as 3.0 with xdmp turned on, no nfs, no remote root, no pulling a kernel from pxe or a bootp server and best of all no client setup other than creating a account. We buy x terminals from neoware that we just point to the terminal server and you instantly have a desktop. We also have a cd client just pop in a cd reboot and in seconds you have a connection to the terminal server. The time to configure a redhat server for thin client environment is less than 1 minute from the time I log into root's desktop.
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Re: Another Important Point
(Score: 0)
by Anonymous on Feb 05, 2005 - 02:23 PM
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Largo, the city that runs Linux on 800 diskless workstations, for 1500 staff and the police, Fire, other services, etc., got their thin client terminals on the cheap, from ebay, and did pay to buy the top LCD monitors.
But, they did not have the problems with 'management' on the level of a major corporation, like Boeing or IBM, where there are 480,000 desktop computers!
I believe that the way to go with GNU/Linux in a corporate environment is to run thin clients. I note that Largo only has a dozen techs for the 800 terminals, and the single server... and saved over $3 million in the past 3 years.
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Re: Another Important Point
(Score: 0)
by Anonymous on Feb 06, 2005 - 12:10 PM
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Having implemented diskless workstation solutions in a manner similar to what you discuss, I definitely concur that this is THE way to use Linux in corporate environments. The administrative ease (and therefore cost reduction) is simply a dream come true compared to comparative Windows-based solutions.
On the other hand, people really need to work on improving the technologies relevant to this sort of application. LTSP is pretty bad in general and I ended up rolling my own solution using Debian instead. The result works, but has a lot of room for improvement (specifically in the areas of NFS and security). Although it may be the most readily available, I generally disagree with the terminal services approach because powerful workstations are not a significant cost factor anymore. You might as well give your users the responsiveness and multimedia capabilities they are used to. Also, when vector graphics-driven, OpenGL-accelerated desktops become the norm (1.5-2 years), you can forget about running apps on the server.
As for those Windows apps on Windows terminal servers.. Well.. it's high time to develop modern, rich web applications to replace them. (think XUL and Java)
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