On Fri, Nov 15, 2002 at 12:28:41PM +1100, Stuart Guthrie @ SLUG wrote: > > There are numerous examples of solitary work I can do if my desktop is > without network for a period of time. > > Now lets multiply say 400 desktops times a morning without a network > running remote X. Thats 1600 hours. A person-year of work is 1800-2000 > hours (manufacturing background showing) Hmm.. how cheap and easy was > remote X again? Oh and by the way, the CEO wants a word... > > Since desktop PCs are cheap and most businesses are comfortable with > buying the _with hard drives, why not use some of the excellent projects > out there to auto-copy the relevant standard software to each and > auto-config. FAI strings to mind.
Yeah it can be a problem that X needs the network ALL the time. An alternative is to use local X and use network shares which don't need to be connected continuously. I'm not sure about NFS (is there a caching nfs client side for Linux?) but there are things like afs, codafs, intermezzo. (Anyone care to comment on their maturity under linux?) If the clients are windows, it will let you write locally while the network is down and sync later. Works fine with samba -- you can even redirect "My Documents" etc to the samba home share to have a reasonably user-friendly and network fault tolerant environment. Matt -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group - http://slug.org.au/ More Info: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug
