On Sat, 2005-03-26 at 11:40 +0100, Karl Huysmans wrote: > Hi all, > > I want to do a terminal server with about 40 thin clients using > Gentoo. All thin clients will be able to boot PXE, boot image(s) on > one server. Clients will only connect to the server using XDM, desktop > will be KDE. > > Questions: > > -Does anyone have experience? > > -Which is best, PXES, LTSP or just plain syslinux and use a minimal > modified Gentoo install for booting the thin clients?
At work we use pxes. We connect to a win 2003 terminal server, but the only difference you'd have is you'd have it connect to X11/XDMCP etc, and have set a gentoo system up with that. Most excellent. > (I have already tried a few options, PXES complains about ram disk > space while creating the initrd That's odd. I defniately don't get that with 0.9. Over the time I've been using this I have had some problems with it, but only on some systems. Search bugzilla (http://bugs.gentoo.org/query.cgi , use advanced it's better) for some of them. Many times I couldn't get a whole lot done, as I couldn't find anyone else with the same issues. If you run into them, PLEASE comment :) > -Server hardware, have a dual Xeon 2.8 available, curently 2 GB of RAM > is this enough? That hardware is definately enough. With that many thin clients, you will probably need more RAM, however. > -Any advantage in using Gigabti ethernet for the clients? Not really, though your network overall might move a little better with a gigabit backbone (i.e. gigabit switch at the center, your other 100Mbps switch(es) connected to this. You definately would want the server attached to the gigabit if you went this route). > > -Client hardware, anyone any experience with dedicated thin clients? Most of our thin clients are old Dells, I think they are P3 350's or 400's with as little as 32MB RAM. 64MB is more common, simply because it's rare to actually find a 32MB memory module. The trick is usually the network card: It has to support PXE booting. Many do these days. You have to go into the bios to check this out. When we run into one that doesn't, we just throw a newer 3com in. > > -Audio ??? Any ideas? I know pxes supports it, not sure what this means on the server side of things. I have done printer routing, where the printers are connected to the client over parallel or USB, and that works fine. > Thanks for any help! No problem! I hope it works out well, this methood has saved us *THOUSANDS* of dollars, and probably a few thousand man-hours of BS (compared to actual windows clients, in this case). It's truly a wonderous system. If you go with PXES, I strongly recommend using a linux machine for DHCP. If you end up using machine-specific configs (you'll see later), the easiest way is after you get the specific conf name (CA01BLAHBLLAH.conf) , make a symlink to it with that systems more common name. Makes finding configs a LOT easier. You can't do symlinks if the TFTP server is a windows server ... I deal with this stuff daily, shoot me a direct email if you want. -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
