Hi, On Wed, 06 Oct 2004, Ben Higginbottom wrote:
> >It's also a requirement to tackle 2-8 Mbps bandwidth between the schools > >and a central server-farm. In my experience an university often has at > >least 10 or 100 Mbps between buildings. It's not posible to increase > >the bandwidth to 10 or 100 Mbps in the near future. > > IIRC When I tried to break Owens test room, it was 30 machines on 10Mb's > and they all handled opening open office at the same time without > difficulty. I can provide you with Owens email if its not on the > presentation and your interested in harder numbers. When you say OpenOffice (OOo) on 30 machines, what were you testing? I may be wrong but I would guess that OOo running on 30 or more clients, be they thin or otherwise wouldn't likely cause that much bandwidth usage. If all clients started up OOo exactly simultaneously over nfs/afs, that might be a different story as the binary itself is a big file(s). If anything though, this might reveal a slightly improbable situation where thin clients are more bandwidth economic than their nfs/afs counterpart. I realise OOo would load the server, but Knut's purely talking about bandwidth. Thin clients generally use more bandwidth than even lessdisks (or similar) systems. The relatively short period of startup time of OOo might be an exception of course. Not meaning to be smart or anything, I'm just trying to understand the test. > If you face a similar situation, then instead of just crippling internet > access, the computers themselves would become useless, unless of course > there was a local server. Well, he did say there should be a local server. > By having even a small amount of local drive space, say a 16Mb CF card > you can provide further redundancy. Is this not is a new point of failure in every desktop and an extra maintenance drain? CF would be more reliable than hard disks for sure but such equipment would have to be bought in and installed on every pc and rewritten when necessary. I'm presuming they are easily bootable on old machines, I don't know. PXE/Etherboot NICs are trivial to install and need no real maintenance at all. They need a server of course, but surely a 16MB CF storage will not solve that need either? To mitigate the fire problem, would you not need either a local server or a full client installed to the hard disk? Gavin
