thin client or stand alone - which is better?

[Gavin McCullagh]

Hi,

On Tue, 29 Jan 2008, Jim Hutchinson wrote:

> 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.

If it's really one room, I presume your thin clients are connected to the
thin client server through a single switch.  This should be ideal.  You
just get a 100Mb/sec switch with a couple of 1Gb/sec ports.  Plug the
server into the 1Gb (using a decent Cat5E cable and a 1Gb/sec card on the
server) port and the others into 100Mbit/sec ports.  If network bandwidth
is really running out, this should improve your situation substantially.  

Are you sure network bandwidth is the issue though?  What makes you think
that?  If you have a little time I'd really recommend installing munin.
It's fantastically useful for diagnosing bottlenecks in machines.  Within a
couple of days, you'll have useful data to diagnose your problem.  It's
probably one of 

 - slow io access (disks)
 - short of ram (swapping)
 - short of cpu 
 - short of network bandwidth

> 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.

You just install cron-apt, the cron job itself is part of it.  It's really
simple.   When you go to run apt-get upgrade, you'll find the packages
are already downloaded and ready to go.

Gavin