Re: Re: How bandwidth requirement could be reduced when using thin clients?

[Ben Higginbottom <ben.higginbottom@ntlworld.com>]

Hi,

Gavin McCullagh Wrote:


> 
> Not meaning to be smart or anything, I'm just trying to understand the
> test.

Well it wasnt anything like a formal test, more akin to half the lug deciding to see if we couldnt break the system by loading a large number of large and seldom used apps. The system was still being developed and Owen hadnt explained all of it fully. The binary is either shared out from the local machine or from the cache 1 layer up. One of the other guys at the LUG checked the network at the time and it didnt show any spike. 

> Well, he did say there should be a local server.

Sorry, must have missed that. I thought the X servers themselves were being run from the farm as opposed to local.

> 
> Is this not is a new point of failure in every desktop and an extra
> maintenance drain?  CF would be more reliable than hard disks for sure but
> such equipment would have to be bought in and installed on every pc and
> rewritten when necessary.  I'm presuming they are easily bootable on old
> machines, I don't know.
> 

Its not too difficult with either a driver disk or a modern bios, although I have to admit I've never tried it with a P1. Schools in the UK get rather large sums of money for IT equipment that generally gets spent on desktops and MS software as opposed to network infrastructure. 

Of the two TC systems that weve rolled out the networking has been the major headache, from builders cutting the fibre to the windows system causing appaling latency due to broadcast traffic from NetBEUI. In addition the lack of a decent network fs that can be safely left in the hands of the schools support staff has hurt us more than once. 

As for maintenance and installation of a CF drive, there certainly no more so intensive than an boot chip. Once plugged in they keep working until they fail, the same as an boot chip. I suppose the AFS solution could have the initial installation files pulled from a tftp server via a network boot without it having a severe impact on the system boot times.

Still from a pure thin client, single boot perspective your right their just a resorce drain. After spending 11 months thinking about and solving the problems with dual boot systems its a little difficult not to think in those terms :)

Regards,

Ben


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