Andy Green wrote:
Somebody in the thread at some point said:
I'd expect much better performance with the ltsp approach (running only
X on the client with the desktop and apps on the faster machine) than
you would have running the 2nd machine as a workstation with everything
mounted via NFS.
Another way to come at a "Diskless" machine nowadays is just to install
Fedora on a USB stick (2GB will do fine) and use a common network
filesystem. That significantly reduces what is expected of the server
box down to just pushing files around on demand.
Updating the USB images could be a drawback if you have many boxes, but
if you have a network /home and no client-specific data on the stick,
you can just nuke the sticks with a new image now and then. There's a
bunch of ways to split the client-local -ness of the deal with the server.
With the "dual-channel" USB sticks the general client performance is
really good at no cost to the server.
This would depend on the age of the client machine. A lot of older
pentium, PII and PIII boxes only had USB 1.x interfaces which would be
extremely slow, but most were capable of PXE booting and if they have a
decent video card can be good thin clients.
The really, really, easy way to try it out is to install the k12ltsp
distribution, which isn't a distribution in the usual sense but a full
copy of fedora or centos, depending on the version, plus ltsp and some
other stuff, on a server with 2 nics, and it will all come up working,
doing dhcp/network booting only on one interface so as not to interfere
with your main network. There is a wiki here:
http://www.k12ltsp.org/mediawiki/index.php/Main_Page but it isn't always
up to date about versions. If you poke around the download site
ftp://k12linux.mesd.k12.or.us/pub/K12LTSP/, the verions with EL in the
name are centos based, the others fedora, and I think the fedora 7.0.0
version is still under the testing directory.
--
Les Mikesell
lesmikesell@xxxxxxxxx
