Life after LTSP

[Odin Nøsen]

I agree with Robert. We had 800 LTSP clients at our school, and are now moving them over
to DRBL. But we are going to do both systems for a while. DRBL is good for the "new"
used machines with >1GB RAM and >P4 1Ghz CPU. We can also use "old" used machines from
the local companies with LTSP that they give to the school. The users are aware of the
difference between LTSP and DRBL - and they can see what kind of machine it is.

> hardware is so cheap now. You can buy a brand new power efficient and
> fast  desktop system for about $200 (not including monitor).  Thin
> clients are actually *more* expensive now.

In Norway the situation is a bit different. A new machine costs about $500 (without
monitor) - so we use "used" machines that costs about $130. They are good enough for
DRBL, and overkill for LTSP.

> 2)
> programs like flash and java based apps don't work and will never work
> well in an LTSP environment because they are multithreaded and utilize

This is one of the main reasons to use DRBL. We never got localapps to work as good as
we wanted.

> 3)
> Things get even worse when you run video full screen because the data
> is being decoded (high cpu hit) at the server, then pushing *large*
> decompressed data across the lan. It just doesn't scale well.

Go DRBL! :-)

The main bottleneck with DRBL is that some of the old clients only have 100Mb nics. We
try to swap it with a 1Gb nic - or by clients with Gb nics.

> Although I do have dual gigabit nics for the lan and hardware raid 10
> for the server. Each client can have it's own nfs mounted /etc and
> /var so there can still be customization per client.

We have good experiences with SSD-disks (and double/tripple GB-nics) - we don't need
large disks and /home rests at the rather large file servers (not the DRBL-servers).



Odin