On Thursday 2 March 2006 22:03, Jim McQuillan wrote: > Desktop integration of local devices. Floppies, CDRoms and USB memory > devices plugged into the thin client... > Network transparent Audio. running your favorite audio on the server, while > the speakers are attached to the thin client terminal....
The best solution, from a networked thin client perspective, I've seen for this today is via something called NX Server from NoMachine (http://www.nomachine.com). The main problem with discussing that is that there's no common denominator umbrella standard for handling it all, like X. > Encryption of the X protocol. Sure you can tunnel your X connection over > SSH, but there are scaling issues when you run anything more than 30-40 thin > clients from the same server. We have several examples of hundreds of thin > clients connected to the same server, and currently, there isn't a good way > of encrypting the traffic. I don't think you're going to get support for something like this within X itself, nor would it be completely sensible. There are plenty of encryption methods you can use to tunnel network traffic today. There is IPSec, available in the form of something like OpenSwan, or it can be used with devices that support it in hardware. There are also simpler methods using SSL, such as OpenVPN. NoMachine's NX uses SSH incidentally. > Memory use. Imagine 150 users connecting to a server and all running Gnome > or KDE, Firefox, OpenOffice and a handful of other applications. The memory > requirements in this scenario are huge. Yes, server memory requirements are huge. You're running graphical applications on a server, all with their own toolkits and nuances, that would normally be run on a client with far greater resources. All these applications would have to be designed for thin client usage to be run from a server or there would have to be some common denominator (toolkit, technology etc.) between them designed with thin client usage in mind. In terms of thin client resource and memory usage, OpenOffice and Firefox seem to be non-starters in my experience. The only other way this could be improved is via some kind of load balancing[1], but this is rather sketchy as well. A dialogue with the Linux Virtual Server people[2] might be useful. Cheers, David [1] http://www.nomachine.com/ar/view.php?ar_id=AR10B00069 [2] http://www.linuxvirtualserver.org/ _______________________________________________ Desktop_architects mailing list [email protected] https://lists.osdl.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop_architects
