Is it just me, or is LTSP a mess?

[monteslu at cox.net]

---- David Van Assche <dvanassche at gmail.com> wrote: 
> I've taken a look into the email in question, and can answer some
> questions. I in no way am affiliated with canonical, though I do work
> within the ed/ubuntu community. Firstly, Scott mentions not using
> 8.04, clearly you should upgrade as that will solve 50% of your
> issues... the other issues are all valid, and I guess the problem is
> one of communication between developers and end users. Lets address
> the issues seperately:
> 
> - The gnome lingering process problem
> 
> Agreed.. this is a heavy issue that is a pain in the behind, but it is
> not LTSP centric... the fault lies with gnome. Right now the
> workaround is a watchdog script, which seems to work ok, but is by no
> means a fix... This needs to be tackled from the gnome side... Right
> now the solution is in monitoring and ending misbehaving processes
> through the script or by hand via pkill -u or killall. It makes sense
> to clean all processes at least 1 time per day... consider it
> maintenance.
> 
> - tcm (thin client manager)
> 
> Indeed this no longer exists, and I believe it has been discussed
> about here before on various occasions. Italc has replaced thin client
> manager as the software that should be run to control thin clients
> from a centralised location. The new documentation reflects this (new
> in intrepid ibex), and I agree it was confusing, but a quick jump to a
> channel of importance (#ltsp primarily, but also #edubuntu) will give
> you the answers you need. Or a search in google. To install it is
> apt-get install italc-client
> 

Is it just the docs that have been fixed for 8.10? As far as I can tell italc was broken on 8.04 and I needed to remove it. This is something that should be backported to the Long Term Support version.
Thin Client Manager currently locks up on 8.04 as well.



> - port forwarding
> 
> The reason this is not built in is because no one knows how the
> network structure looks like at a particular location. There could be
> many different setups, but the documentation tells you how to easily
> do this in the most common way (this has been in documentation for a
> while now):
> 

Agreed. I have a separate IPcop box for content filtering, port forwarding, intrusion detection, etc.

> - lts.conf file
> 
> This is where LTSP gets complex, and its the same across ALL
> distributions... If you don't know how to create a file, then it is
> not recommended you touch a lts.conf file. Increasingly, reliance on
> this file has been diminished to the point that in MOST setups the
> lts.conf file is not really required. But if it is, a quick read
> through the documentation will show you an example file and where it
> should go.
> 

I've got a couple of 3 year old Dell workstations that need their video explicitly set in lts.conf
I have to set printer servers in lts.conf. I'm still using lts.conf to do my load balancing.
It would be great if I didn't have to edit this file, but I don't see it going away any time soon.

And the skeleton file that tells you to read the documentation points to a documentation file that doesn't exist. Instead you get to search through the ubuntu website to find the parameters and examples.


Luis