brainstorming about wireless thin clients

[john]

Hi all,

Apologies if this topic has been talked to death; please direct me to
eulogy if that is the case :->


I was wondering what the state of the art is on booting ltsp thin
clients via a wireless nic? We've had an ever increasing number of
request for laptops inside the classroom, as a supplement to the labs
that we have. Essentially every classroom is now a potential lab
space. We have a enterprise type wireless infrastructure at two of our
schools that are A/B/G/N capable.

I see that one of the older edubuntu faq's doesn't hold out much hope:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/EdubuntuFAQ#Can_I_set_up_LTSP_over_a_wireless_connection.3F

However time has passed so maybe it's worth talking about again.

When I think about doing this it seems that the laptops would:

- have to have a small os on disk/cd/floppy with drivers for the wifi
card. It seems like the etherboot project has been working on wireless
support http://etherboot.org/wiki/wirelessboot. I've never used it,
though I used to use the rom-o-matic images on older machines.

-The network card would have to be 5Ghz N and the AP's would have to
support 5 Ghz N (doesn't look like etherboot project has 5 ghz
support) .

- That there should be as little traffic as possible after the TC was
booted so many apps would go local (OO, Firefox etc)

- 30 laptops/400 mbit sec = 13 mbits/sec per client best case, perhaps
I am crazy to consider this?

- problems with wireless contention, collision etc hopefully handled
by decent wireless controller/N spec

Google tells me that many folks have asked about this in years past
and that it was considered a hair-brained idea.

If this is already a solved problem I'd be happy to hear it.

Thanks!

John