On 13 Nov, Jeff Waugh wrote: > Centralised execution is a huge win, or at least I think so. :-) I've done a > number of rollouts for various clients, using X and Win4Lin; simple GNOME > desktops and OpenOffice; and rdesktop for el-cheap-o terminal services on > low end hardware. Lots of room for savings, bucketloads of room for > administrative overhead reduction.
The approach at work is to have a central /opt area, and OpenOffice etc. installed there. It's a file server. This centralises admin but scales well too - since the execution is done on the desktop machines (which are supercomputers by previous generations' standards). Having more than a few X terminals executing typical GUI applications chews a lot of CPU cycles, in contrast. Check out http://www.zip.com.au/~cs/syncopt/index.html for a writeup of the scripts that govern this, how to build packages ready for central installation, etc. There's a touch of auto-mounting goes on too, to serve up architecture-specific binaries without changing any path names (e.g. /opt/bin). It works very well. luke -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group - http://slug.org.au/ More Info: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug
