Fat clients or standalone for DVD watching?

[Tom Atkins]

Many thanks for the very helpful replies David and Gavin.  I will have a go at setting up the FAT clients as described (probably
next month) and will report back on how I get on!

Tom

> Date: Mon, 19 May 2008 16:17:33 +0200
> From: "David Van Assche" <dvanassche at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: Fat clients or standalone for DVD watching?
> To: "Edubuntu Users Group" <edubuntu-users at lists.ubuntu.com>
> Message-ID:
> 	<8cc423ef0805190717u6ad470bco9c1c6ebf3e5ad495 at mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
> 
> The Fat client setup is more than enough for running multimedia apps on, in
> fact it was thought out with that in mind. I've tested it with KDE, XFCE and
> Gnome and all work quite well. I would advise that you first install the
> environment with the plugin, then enter the chroot and install LDAP and NFS,
> as well as all the multimedia apps you're gonna need.
> 
> It would be nice if someone could figure out how to mount via sshfs instead
> of nfs (the latter seems a bit jerky sometimes, plus there is the security
> issue.) I've been unable to tunnel the /home through ssh... too complicated
> for me... but there are people on this list who could do it in seconds ;-)
> 
> When setting up the LDAP server on the ubuntu box, there are some things
> that don't work quite as they should when going through some of the wikis.
> For example, when installing smbldap-tools, it should copy a bunch of
> scripts that allow you to migrate the unix users to LDAP, but nothing
> happens. So you manually have to copy the scripts from here:
> /usr/share/doc/smbldap-tools/examples/migrationscripts as well as the
> smb.conf, smbldap.conf and smbldap_bind.conf found in the examples directory
> to /etc/smbldap-tools. Then edit the smb*.conf files so that you have the
> right LDAP server settings in there.
> 
> As Gavin said, it seems silly to install the environment in a local
> harddrive... it would be better from an administration point to make it a
> chroot so you only have to update one location, as opposed to every fat
> client... so diskless would be the way to go.
> 
> Kind Regards,
> David Van Assche
> 
> On Sun, May 18, 2008 at 3:08 PM, Gavin McCullagh <gmccullagh at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> 
> > Hi,
> >
> > On Sun, 18 May 2008, Tom Atkins wrote:
> >
> > > We are buying a couple of new PCs  for 'multimedia' in the same lab - in
> > > particular watching of DVD's and burning CD's.  What is the best way to
> > set
> > > these up? Should I just install Ubuntu locally on each of the new PCs and
> > > then use NFS and LDAP for authentication and file sharing to the server?
> > Or
> > > would the LTSP Fat client setup work for DVD watching?
> >
> > From a maintenance point of view (applying patches, adding packages, disk
> > failures, keeping the installs consistent), the LTSP stuff would be handy.
> > Local desktops might have some advantages too though.
> >
> > > Fat client setup as described here:
> >
> > > https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UbuntuLTSP/LTSPFatClients
> > >
> > > If the Fat Client setup would work, would the Fat Clients be diskless or
> > > would I need to buy hard drives?
> >
> > The general idea is that they would be diskless though they could I guess
> > have local storage if you wanted it.  It seems to miss the point if you
> > need to do that though.
> >
> > Gavin
> >