thin client or stand alone - which is better?

[Jim Kronebusch]

On Fri, 25 Jan 2008 12:43:37 -0700, Jim Hutchinson wrote
> Greetings all,
> 
> We currently have an edubuntu thin-client lab running on some very old
> client hardware (new server). We will be getting some upgraded client
> hardware this summer. They will be HP D530s which are 5 years old but
> a big jump up from the 10 year old stuff we have now.
> 
> I suspect these will run the edubuntu desktop edition just fine. The
> question I have is, what are the benefits and drawbacks to desktop
> install vs thin-client? How do we decide which way to go? It seems
> that desktop installs would offer a speed advantage but would be
> harder to install, upgrade and maintain. Given a choice, which way
> would you go?
> 
> Thanks,
> Jim

Which came first, the chicken or the egg?  Same sort of question to me.

I am working on perfecting a mixed environment at our school, for a couple of reasons. 
Thin clients, awesome.  Install one machine, boot the rest.  Need a new app, install one
place, show up on all machines.  Hardware for thin clients can be much lower in cost and
don't have near the requirements.  But the thin clients are not a perfect world, we have
the pixmap cache to X issue, digital cameras don't work perfect on plug in, usb card
readers don't trigger the right events to work flawlessly, hardware expansion for
CDROM/additional video card/etc isn't always simple (depending on your hardware),
scanning and local printing might be a pain from the client, and the more intensive use
with concurrent clients everyone suffers..  

Now stand alone machines don't have any of the problems in the previous sentence.  But
you have to maintain the software separately, you have more moving parts that can fail,
hardware is usually more expensive do to higher requirements, etc.  

So there are pros and cons to both.  Here all student machines are thin clients because
they don't really have a reliance the things that comprise the cons list.  Now teachers,
that is a different story.  They often would want to use a card reader, a local printer
or scanner, an additional video card for projection purposes, smart boards, etc.  So I
want teachers to have stand alone machines.

Let's say you could still manage those stand alone machines centrally, with something
like Diskless Remote Booting.  You could still have central storage and authentication
by building LDAP Auth and NFS homes into your DRBL image.  Now you get the best of both
worlds, you can deploy mass computing cheap in areas where you don't need the extras. 
But where you need more power or special configurations, you can go FAT client and
centrally manage.  Much more cost effective and can still make everyone happy.  So that
is what I am working on here.  Hopefully by the end of the summer break I'll have an
excellent road map laid out, right now I just have theories and testing :-)

Bottom line is, thanks to the freedom of Linux, you can make anything easy if you want
to work hard at it :-)  But you need to way the pros and cons and make the decision for
yourself to decide what you want to do.  If nothing else, do a central LDAP with NFS
/home directories for your FAT clients, install ssh server or some type of remote
management so you can update/install remotely.

Hope my rambling helps,

Jim

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