On Sunday 21 April 2002 03:00 am, you wrote:
> Guys,
>
> A customer has come to me asking about the possibility of using Linux in a
> new rollout. They are keen on using Linux on thin clients, and the best
> solution seems to be LTSP.
>
> Configuration will prob be something like KDE3, Open Office/Staroffice etc
>
> What I need to know is:
>
> Best client hardware (Wyse WinTerm model?)
> Scalability? ie. how many clients per server?
> Reference sites?
> Any suggestions?
>
> Thankyou greatly for you help, and also many thanks to LTSP ppl,
There is a city in the US, Largo, that does it's entire administration (a few
hundred clients I think) on thin clients. They say an extra KDE session
weights in at an extra 11 megs of ram. Add to this apps (lukily memory
management in linux is good, it shares all the mem it can so app's don't get
loaded twice). Star office is a bigger problem. You have the advantage you
only got to start it once but I maybe it's a good idea to try how many mem an
extra openoffice program takes by starting like 10 staroffices as different
users on the same machine, with swap disabled, just to see how much mem each
extra one takes.
As for network, remote X is pretty bandwidth-intensive. It's best to separate
NFS server and the server with the powerful cpu's where the X clients run.
Put gigabit stuff in each, consider maybe making use of the bonding driver
support if that works with ltsp (no experience, my personal setup only has 1
client :-) ).
For the nfs server, where probably the swapfiles will be located (saves on
electricity if your clients are diskless): use REAL fast hard drives.
For the ltsp server: You'll need whole gigs of ram (Go for 8) and a quad CPU
system at least. Maybe it's best to set up some test case with 30 clients or
so and see what disk speed and memory that requires. Forget about using ia32
or ia64 as an ltsp server, it's unscalable or dead-slow. Consider using a
system with alpha processors or something like a sun server - well figure it
out for yourself, I always find it funny to assemble dream machines I can
never afford :) . If I start from a sun fire v880 I end up spending 120000
USD, that's about 240 per client, which means you're going to spend way more
money per client on the servers as on the clients - which you can get in bulk
from some bankrupt company ;). I recommend pentia for the clients with 32
megs of ram. 16 is possible, but will put a greater strain on your
swap-server. It will depend on your screen resolution and on how fancy you
want your desktop to be how much mem you'll need (images stuff are stored
server-side, I mean: in the X-server's side.)
Have fun with your customer ;)
Frank
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