Re: Both diskless (thick) and thin clients out of the box?

[Halvor Dahl <halvor@skolelinux.no>]

Petter Reinholdtsen wrote:

> During my stay at the edubuntu conference this weekend, I got an idea
> for an extention to the current network structure:
>
> We can keep LTSP for the thin client servers, serving thin clients on
> the thin client network like today, and add lessdisks on the
> main-server to serve think clients on the skolelinux network out of
> the box.  We can use the same DHCP configuration for both workstations
> and diskless (thick) clients, and the workstations will just ignore
> the pxe information and boot as before, while the diskless clients
> will fetch the kernel and mount the root directory from the main
> server.
>
> The idea is to provide more flexibility out of the box.  If one want
> to use thin clients, these will still stay on a separate network (to
> keep the trafic out of the backbone network).  If one want to use
> thicker clients without any local disks, these can be booted using PXE
> on the backbone network.
>
> As far as I can see, the only change we need to do is
>
> - enable lessdisks on main-server out of the box
>
> - modify dhcp for the skolelinux (backbone) network to use lessdisks
>   for PXE booting.
>
> Comments?
>
>
>  

Why would anyone want to use thin clients if you can get thick
diskless clients out of the box?

The only possible argument I can see is investment cost for client
hardware.  But even used PC's with 256 Mb RAM may be used as lessdisks
clients which means that this argument is not very strong anymore.


Halvor