"Thick"clients configuration

[Dag Sverre Seljebotn]

> With these computers, my idea is to have the the base system will be
> on the local hard drive and the light application will run locally,
> but the heavy ones to run on the server.
>
> How should I configrure that and where can I get more information ?
>   
If this is what you want, then I suppose you get them working as normal 
thick clients first (you should then mount the home drives over NFS or 
something similar, there should be guides elsewhere to help you with 
that, I don't have the time to look them up now).

Then, to take ooffice as an example:

Then try out something like this:

xhost +
hostname=$(hostname)
ssh server "DISPLAY=$hostname:0 ooffice"

ie you connect to the server with ssh, and launch ooffice with DISPLAY 
set to point to your client. xhost + opens up X access to the thin 
client, you can pass it more parameters to only open up for the server...

If you want more security, you can instead do simply
ssh -Y server ooffice

which will encrypt the connection (simpler to set up, more secure, and 
slower).

To make it a permanent solution, you first set up transparent SSH logins 
for all users (generated id_dsa and authorized_keys). Then you can put 
something similar to the above in a wrapper script in 
/usr/local/bin/ooffice. Sorry, can't flesh it out more, gotta run...

> What is your idea about such a configuration ?
>   
Not sure :-) I think normal thin-client will be easier to set up, and if 
the server can handle it more pleasant to use. But it might make it 
possible to run more clients on the server. *shrug*

Dag Sverre