Actually, some of these services work perfectly well on Amazon's EC2**
Step 1 is clearly a problem, it's clearly impossible for DHCP to happen over
the internet.
but Amazon EC2 instances can run any (linux) software that uses real TCP or
UDP for network transport:
so it should possible to get TFTP -- it's not *designed* to go over the net,
so it's probably going to be
surprisingly slow.
NFS is also known to be painfully slow over the net.
The good news is, ssh works just fine. And at least if you're using the
(proprietary) NX server from NoMachine, a real Gnome desktop works fine
too-- when I tried it, it ran firefox faster than my laptop -- presumably
you can get more-or-less the same performance with an open source X
protocol.
Jesse Wolfe
Stephen,
>
> There's a number of challenges to making this work.
>
> 1) The bootrom in the thin client is going to do an Ethernet broadcast
> looking for a DHCP server. There's no way for the Amazon "cloud" to see
> that request. You could try a dhcp forwarder, if your router supports
> that, but the cloud isn't going to be listening for dhcp requests
> anyway. So, you'll be stuck having to serve dhcp from a local machine.
>
> 2) Once the client gets an IP address, it's going to use TFTP to grab a
> minimal image. The cloud isn't going to be listening for TFTP requests,
> so you'll strike out there too. Maybe have a local machine to serve up
> the kernel images via tftp.
>
> 3) If you get this far, the kernel and ramfs will need to mount a root
> filesystem from a server. Either NFS or NBD is what LTSP uses. The
> cloud isn't going to be offering either of those services. Sounds like
> a local machine would be needed, to serve up the root filesystem.
>
> 4) Ok, so now you've got a linux kernel running and a root filesystem
> mounted. Next step, LDM gives a login screen. It's actually just a
> fancy wrapper around SSH. Does the cloud offer SSH login capability?
> If not, you'll need a local machine that allows you to log in via SSH.
>
> 5) Once the SSH login is working, and the user logs in, it's going to
> look for a desktop environment like Gnome or KDE or XFCE to run. Are
> those environments going to exist on the cloud? I rather doubt it.
> Sounds like a local machine will be needed to offer the desktop.
>
> In a nutshell, that's how LTSP works. It really requires a local
> machine, or at least a machine that can offer the services I mentioned
> above.
>
> I suppose it's possible to rig up something where you could run some of
> those things on a cloud, but in the end, it wouldn't look much like LTSP.
>
> Cloud computing is a pretty good idea, but I think it's really intended
> for web-based applications, not serving operating systems.
>
> Jim McQuillan
> j...@ltsp.org
>
>
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