Re: [Win4Lin-users] Re: Upgrade policy

[Chris Semple]

Hoyt wrote:

 

Have you looked at their Win4Lin Server product?

Hoyt
 

Yes I have, although it is based on Win4lin 2.0, which was only Beta at the time.

I have had some trouble finding info about the product, but from what I believe it currently operates is not suitable for us because of the following reasons  (Please correct if I am wrong or there are workarounds):

• Each user has to have their own "Windows installation".  Although this can be managed to some extent, I am faced with either:
• An installation for each user - Way too much diskspace and overhead to manage and keep consistent.  - Our offices have up to 400 users - mostly Unix/Linux.  Therefore assume an installation size of say 500MB (small) we would need 200GB for the installations.
• An installation for each "concurrent user".  Also an issue, as we have about 30 concurrent users on our NT terminal server and expect to double that in the coming months (Will be setting up another system also).  This would mean having to cater for in effect 60 windows installations across two servers.  It also raises issues about how to keep things consistent when the next person logs in and how to keep track of who is using which "windows installation".  Restoring from a template "windows installation" is not considered as a viable option because of the high background load it creates.  Has anyone done anything in this area, perhaps read only Windows installations?
• If there is an alternative to this issue (or planned), it would help greatly.
• Lack of windows networking support is the other major issue we have.  Yes you can use Linux to provide those services (well most of them), but the users are already familiar with using network neighborhood to find the services they are after.  They would not consider it advancement if we removed this facility and trained them how to configure Linux to do the same thing in the background.  For them to learn a new way of doing this (and us provide support for this), would be a major task.  Perhaps if new facilities were being setup this wouldn't be much of an issue, but we don't have that benefit.  Does anyone know if there is a timeframe for provision of Windows Networking?

If (more likely when) these issues are resolved, I expect we will be well placed to look seriously at replacing the NT terminal servers.  (They have proved themselves not to be the most reliable systems on the floor)

ps.  I would be most interested in finding out other people's success or otherwise of rolling out Win4lin Server to larger user bases.

Regards,
Chris.