Thin Clients

[Eberhard Roloff]

Mark Haney wrote:

> 
> This is a LARGE kettle of fish.  Thin Clients mean a lot of different 
> things to a lot of different people.  I've done this for a health care 
> company and I'll share what I know, I hope it helps.
> 
> The biggest problem you will see is bandwidth.  Unless you've got fiber 
> run between the schools back to the CO (or high speed transport anyway) 
> this will get hairy in a hurry.  (Nothing like alliteration, huh?)
> 
> If this is even going to be somewhat viable, you're better off having 
> primary servers at each school for the clients to pull from.  Or you'll 
> choke your internet bandwidth too much.  Even a remote X session, as 
> thin as that might be can get heavy fast when running Firefox, 
> Thunderbird, OpenOffice, etc.

Perfectly true. Even when the network internally to each school is 
somehow strangled (ex. I saw dLAN connections via mains in some 
schools), you might be in trouble.

A very good solution for terminal server access is freeNX, which 
provides X nicely via slow links. It is easy to install and adds a nice 
touch by providing windows sessions to Linux Clients, if needed.

Kind regards
Eberhard