Full LTSP-cluster or just load balancer for many thin clients

[Alkis Georgopoulos]

Στις 10/08/2012 07:57 μμ, ο/η ssanders at mbsbooks.com έγραψε:
> My possible installation at work would be a very light need for apps, but
> about 180 thin clients. There will be no need for localapps, and no thick
> clients. 90% of them only do two things: a character based 5250 emulation
> (basically telnet, with some special function keys defined) to IBM
> AS400/iSeries servers and a SSH connection to an AIX server. The other 10%
> will additionally have Firefox to only look at intranet based reports.
> There will never be any YouTube, Flash or multimedia use, and perhaps only
> 5 of them will ever have any local docs (and LibreOffice) at all. Only a
> handful will ever need outside internet access.
>
> XFCE instead of Unity or gnome-session-fallback would be fine, and further
> reduce requirements. In testing just a few on Edubuntu 12.04, old 128meg o'
> ram junkers perform just fine, some will be PCs removed from office use,
> some will be little 15-watt fanless PCs.

I'd suggest localapps or LTSP fat clients for this. You'll be able to 
serve any number of telnet/ssh clients without wasting any server 
resources or bandwidth after the initial booting, so you can use a 
modest server.
SCREEN_07=ssh <params>
SCREEN_08=telnet <params>
etc.

The other 10% is only about 20 clients, so you can use either thins or 
localapps or fats, your choice. They can be served from the same 
server/chroot.