Does Open Source make life easy????

[Gavin McCullagh]

Hi,

On Thu, 15 Nov 2007, Karl Goetz wrote:

> 54mb router.
> 20 clients
> =
> 3mb each.
> I'm not sure i can agree running NFS homes over 3mb wireless is a good
> idea tbh.

Actually, it's quite a bit less than 3Mbit each because you never get
more than about 20Mb/sec at the application layer.  However, users don't
read and write their home directory constantly.  There would be some
natural interleaving.  That said, I'm really not sure how many people could
use home directories over 802.11g.

You could just have a single account on each machine and one local home
directory, but you'll need to work out how to lock the machines down so
people can't mess the desktop settings around (sabayon?).  At that point,
users could each have a USB key to store their own data on.

> > Gavin suggested.  There are many solutions for mass cloning that I'm
> > sure could be figured out fairly quick.
> 
> The ongoing maintainace is the real kicker.

Agreed.  But that's going to be the case no matter what they use and I
really can't see thin clients working over wifi.  Localising home
directories will make this even worse.  If you have NFS, LDAP or NIS and a
bit of skill with apt packaging, you can cut the maintenance down
considerably.  Of course, disk failures and so forth will still be
troublesome.

I suspect the long-term cost of _not_ wiring these machines and therefore
not using thin clients could be considerable.

Gavin