Hello All, Here is my situation. We are a 10 (soon to be 11) store automotive retail tire and service company. We currently have our own AS400 at our corporate office that runs our point of sale/inventory/accounting system that is networked to our retail locations via a dedicated frame relay network (Yuck! Hate it! Too slow! Too Expensive!). The point of sale (POS) terminals are currently dumb terminals (Computer Labs International ET2000's) that do green screen 5250 terminal and printer emulation and connect back to the AS400. I am in the process of researching options to provide better functionality to our store operators. I would like to have the same functionality that we have now (I have looked into tn5250) and add office applications, email, and a web browser.
My original idea was to replace the frame network with DSL/Cable internet access at each retail location and establish Ipsec VPN tunnels back to the corporate router and do PXE boot at the retail locations. Some of you read my previous post about PXE booting via a VPN tunnel and thank you for the help. Although I did get it to work, the time that it takes to download the kernel and mount the file system eliminates it as a viable option. I am not sure if reducing the kernel size will help, but it seems that the transfer rate over the VPN is just too slow. So I am back to the drawing board. Perhaps there is a way to eliminate the VPN tunnel for the boot process. I am open to suggestions. I know that one option is to have a local boot server at each of the 10 retail stores, but I would like to avoid adding that much hardware. I have only recently delved into Linux and am learning things every day. My question is about LTSP vs embedded Linux OS thin clients. What are the pros/cons of local boot servers and PXE boot thin clients versus Linux OS embedded thin clients. Any feedback is greatly appreciated. Regards, Aaron J. Wood Sun Tire Services, Inc ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Check out the new SourceForge.net Marketplace. It's the best place to buy or sell services for just about anything Open Source. http://sourceforge.net/services/buy/index.php _____________________________________________________________________ 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.freenode.net
