thin client or stand alone - which is better?

[Jim Hutchinson]

On Jan 29, 2008 2:48 AM, Gavin McCullagh <gmccullagh at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> On Mon, 28 Jan 2008, Jim Hutchinson wrote:
>
> > Thanks for all the feedback. It seems that having both fat and thin
> > would be ideal but I don't have that option. I only have the one lab
> > and it may be difficult to keep it as we continue to grow.
>
> I think you do have the option.  Basically, thin clients are the completely
> straightforward route which should work out of the box.  By setting up LDAP
> and NFS you can keep your thin clients and add on a few fat ones too.  As
> someone else mentioned, dual booting the two is also possible (though
> probably confusing for users).

Thanks again. I think the idea of dual booting two Linux approaches is
cool and will definitely look into this. The main concern would be the
network. How to have fat clients with dedicated network connections
but thin-clients that share it (via the server). Speed here is a big
concern (see my comment below).

We only have one lab with 26 computers so it's not like we would have
some fat clients here and thin clients there. It will be all one or
all the other or maybe all dual booting.

>
> > I think the admin benefits of a thin-client currently outweigh the
> > speed benefits of a fat-client and given I know how to do the
> > thin-client and all the authentication it may not be worth it to
> > switch.
>
> To me, speed is not the issue fat clients solve, it's video.  Of course, if
> your thin client server is maxed out and you can't afford another, fat
> clients would help there too.

By speed I was referring to video as that is problem but also network
speed. With all clients connected to one server with one uplink things
can run really slow. Gigabit switches might solve that but then I
don't know if our network infrastructure is such that it would make
any difference.

Thanks for the other info as well. I'll have to look into cron jobs as
that is not something I've messed with yet as well as clusterssh or
anything similar.

-jim

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