Santa Barbara City College has 35 HP Entria-2 thin clients which currently run X from Alpha/VMS servers. The network is due for an overhaul and I have a few questions. If you know the answers to any of these, please respond, even if that/those question(s) have already been answered, two+ heads are better than one, as it were. :)
Note the environment: 35 thin clients, running a heavy environment like GNOME2 or KDE3 and large development tools like KDevelop or Ajunta, with the possibility of all 35 compiling a small (<500 line) project at once. 1) Has anyone used the Jammin 125 from disklessworkstations.com? How about ThinkNIC from Oracle, the NCD Thinstar TS532LX from NCD, or anything from Neoware? What terminal system would be best? Note that for political reasons we absolutely can NOT use old PCs, or PCs of any kind. Thin client PCs without HDs are okay, but the thin client must be sold as a thin client, must be fanless, must work with Linux, etc. In short, of those listed (or others you might know of) which thin client is best overall? 2) What kind of server will work for this environment? We were thinking along the lines of a dual Xeon 2.8GHz with 12GB RAM and four 10KRPM SCSI drives in RAID10, with a hotspare, and a single gigabit ethernet connection to a bunch of 100Mbit switches for the terminals. I think the biggest concern is bandwidth. There is no way 12GB of RAM will be a bottleneck, and the disk I/O will be minimal using "-pipe -O0" with GCC and having everything cached in RAM. 3) If we use the Jammin' 125's, will swapping over NFS really be necessary? (They have 64MB RAM, we do NOT plan to run ANYTHING locally) 4) Can Coda be used instead of NFS? 5) Can somewith with a 300MHz CPU (roughly a 300MHz Pentium classic) handle decompression/decryption via SSH? How about other X compression protocols? We will probably not use compression, but if we do, what is the general concensus as "works with LTSP well"? Encryption is unimportant, but compressing via SSL is easy. :) 6) This is important: Will some of the LTSP list readers here tell me a few hardware/usage stats for their LTSP system? This info is needed to convince certain people that Linux and LTSP is a viable option. I don't want anyone giving away any trade secrets or anything--I am just hoping some of you fine people can say something like, "I have personally used an X-terminal network running 42? clients from a server with XXX MB/RAM and XX processor(s) and xxx netowrk bandwidth (100Mbit, 1000Mbit, etc) over a switched/hub network and it ran great. These systems were used for (programming/office/email/whatever)" 7) Other than Fargo, California School District 73, and Berkeley, and Ohio State U, are there any good references (particularly university CS labs) using Linux X-terminals (LTSP or otherwise) that I can visit and print out for reference to give to certain people as evidence this will work? Thanks ahead of time for any answers to any of these questions. If someone has already posted your answer, please post it again anyway--redundant answers show that the answer is more likely to be universally true. Best regards, Charles N. Burns ------------------------------------------------------- This sf.net email is sponsored by:ThinkGeek Welcome to geek heaven. http://thinkgeek.com/sf _____________________________________________________________________ Ltsp-discuss mailing list. To un-subscribe, or change prefs, goto: https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/ltsp-discuss For additional LTSP help, try #ltsp channel on irc.openprojects.net
