Charles,
I can answer some of your questions. I use ibm 220 series
netservers, 1GHz, 2 piii processors, 1 or 2GB memory. !GB is good enough
for about 30 stations. i have a mix of clients: Jammin-125 (22 of those),
ThinkNIC (59), and "home built" VIA based fanless boxes.
Jammins are very nice, (btw, they have 32MB memory and no NFS swap
is necessary). the graphics on ThinkNICs are rather sucky but using XVESA
fixes the fuzzy font problem. they work well for character apps and for
occasional browsing - i use them in the warehouses. the VIA boxes are
bigger than Jammins, but otherwise seem to be just as good (longevity will
show up eventually ;-)). i have currently 42 of them and 30 more on
order. All of those terminals work at the same speed, that is to say, they
are fast enough to do X at the network speed.
Network is *very* important. i use 100TX switched and i'm thinking
of going 1000TX for the server interconnects. for the time being the speed
is fine and netwok is not bottlenecked, but i am going to add 150 thin
stations soon. my set up is running in multiple locations, the highest
number of stations on 1 server is currently 34. judging by top, it can
easily grow to 50 within 2GB memory.
your server might be a bit of overkill, but the worker bees will
love it.
if you can run all the apps you need on a linux server, you should
go with the ltsp setup (check out k12osn). it is very cost effective and
fun to play with. julius
On Tue, 8 Oct 2002 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> 1) Has anyone used the Jammin 125 from disklessworkstations.com? How
> about ThinkNIC from Oracle, the NCD Thinstar TS532LX from NCD, or
> anything from Neoware? What terminal system would be best? Note that for
> political reasons we absolutely can NOT use old PCs, or PCs of any kind.
> Thin client PCs without HDs are okay, but the thin client must be sold
> as a thin client, must be fanless, must work with Linux, etc. In short,
> of those listed (or others you might know of) which thin client is best
> overall?
>
> 2) What kind of server will work for this environment? We were thinking along the
>lines of a dual Xeon 2.8GHz with 12GB RAM and four 10KRPM SCSI drives in RAID10, with
>a hotspare, and a single gigabit ethernet connection to a bunch of 100Mbit switches
>for the terminals. I think the biggest concern is bandwidth. There is no way 12GB of
>RAM will be a bottleneck, and the disk I/O will be minimal using "-pipe -O0" with GCC
>and having everything cached in RAM.
>
> 3) If we use the Jammin' 125's, will swapping over NFS really be necessary? (They
>have 64MB RAM, we do NOT plan to run ANYTHING locally)
>
> 4) Can Coda be used instead of NFS?
>
> 5) Can somewith with a 300MHz CPU (roughly a 300MHz Pentium classic) handle
>decompression/decryption via SSH? How about other X compression protocols? We will
>probably not use compression, but if we do, what is the general concensus as "works
>with LTSP well"? Encryption is unimportant, but compressing via SSL is easy. :)
>
> 6) This is important: Will some of the LTSP list readers here tell me a few
>hardware/usage stats for their LTSP system? This info is needed to convince certain
>people that Linux and LTSP is a viable option. I don't want anyone giving away any
>trade secrets or anything--I am just hoping some of you fine people can say something
>like, "I have personally used an X-terminal network running 42? clients from a server
>with XXX MB/RAM and XX processor(s) and xxx netowrk bandwidth (100Mbit, 1000Mbit,
>etc) over a switched/hub network and it ran great. These systems were used for
>(programming/office/email/whatever)"
>
> 7) Other than Fargo, California School District 73, and Berkeley, and Ohio State U,
>are there any good references (particularly university CS labs) using Linux
>X-terminals (LTSP or otherwise) that I can visit and print out for reference to give
>to certain people as evidence this will work?
>
> Thanks ahead of time for any answers to any of these questions. If someone has
>already posted your answer, please post it again anyway--redundant answers show that
>the answer is more likely to be universally true.
> Best regards,
> Charles N. Burns
>
>
>
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