thin client or stand alone - which is better?

[Gavin McCullagh]

Hi,

On Fri, 25 Jan 2008, Charles Austin wrote:

> I set up the thick clients (Edubuntu installed on the local disk) to use
> LDAP authentication and NFS mount the home directories from the LTSP
> server.  
> 
> I eventually got this to work (first time out with LDAP, it took me a
> while), but the login process was very slow on each machine.  Apps also took
> some time to load, I suspect because of network congestion in reading conf
> files from the home directory of the user.  In frustration, I PXE booted all
> the former "thick" client machines, and they ran much faster as thin clients
> (no changes to the network environment - Cisco 2950t, gig uplink to server,
> spanning tree disabled).  Your mileage may vary.

That's very disappointing to hear.  It shouldn't really be a problem to do
these sorts of things.  As you had trouble logging in, I'd guess something
was slowing LDAP down.  The slow application launching might be caused by
the same issue or perhaps NFS needed a little tuning.  Getting config files
over nfs shouldn't cause much network traffic (compared to tunnelled X
sessions) and you don't really add any more disk access compared to the
thin client case.

If you have time at some stage, it would be interesting to try and test
this again to correct the problems.  I'm pretty certain it should be
fixable.

My main problem with thin clients is multimedia apps.  Sound works in one
direction just now, but VoIP probably doesn't.  Video playback can work,
but not if we're talking about lots of users at the same time and high
resolution video.  For video to work well on a large scale, I'd say it's
necessary that the video app be running on the client (which might be
through local apps, or it might be an installed desktop).

Gavin