Fw: Ubuntu for School (epic93dude at gmail.com)

[Jonathan Carter (highvoltage)]

Hi Joseph

On 13/10/2010 22:22, Joseph Hartman wrote:
> Before you get too excited, you should know that there are serious
> drawbacks to LTSP. I used it pretty extensively over the last 4 years
> and abandoned it as soon as I possibly could, but I worked at a school
> where I was the only IT support person and I was only staffed at that
> position for 4 hours per week and I had to do it after the normal school
> day or on the weekend. It sounds like your school is in a better
> situation to start so it may be different for you.
> 
> Basically LTSP is (in my experience) an elegant, robust solution that is
> also very fickle and requires regular oversight. It allows ultimate
> control over terminal computers because everything is really run off of
> the server. This means the admin can lock individual terminals, send
> messages, share their screen, share the screen of a given terminal, log
> out any or all terminals, run programs on any or all terminals and watch
> what is happening on any or all terminals from a maintenance screen
> among other things. This power is alluring, but requires serious
> hardware and the programs can, at times, be very buggy and unreliable
> (although I should point out that there are incredible people working on
> all aspects of LTSP and it is improving at an impressive rate).
> 
> My biggest problem though was the fact that there were too many single
> points of failure. If the server fails or is off, ALL your computers go
> down. If the link from the server to the switch fails, ALL your
> computers go down. If the switch fails or is off or someone accidentally
> disconnects it with their foot or something, ALL your computers go down.
> You get the idea. Anyways, I used it because we had no choice. I had
> Pentium 2 computers to work with and LTSP allowed them to get on the
> internet which is what I needed. As soon as we had some P4s donated
> though, LTSP was out the door.

That's why LTSP-Cluster was developed (https://www.ltsp-cluster.org/).
LTSP cluster links multiple LTSP servers together and load-balances your
users. It also has some high-availability features that prevents the
single-point-of-failure problems.

Also, if your environment has the problem where someone tripping over a
wire could kill the network, then that's a bit hard to solve in software ;)

-Jonathan