Comments inline.
Eric Jeschke wrote:
On Thu, 13 Jun 2002 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
The cheapest server with this capability would be a dual Athlon with 2-4GB
of Registered ECC DDR SDRAM.
This is why I am interested in a "thick-client" solution. It boots over
the network from the server, NFS mounts most of the filesystem on the
server (swap and perhaps a /tmp can be on local machine), but the OS and
apps run on the client. You get all the advantages of LTSP in terms of
central administration, but the server only needs enough compute
power and memory to support file service--a much more scalable
solution. I/O bandwidth is still critical, and to a lesser degree,
network bandwidth, but CPU and memory requirements should be
significantly reduced vs. a full-fledged LTSP server.
Watch out on NFS mounted filesystems as NFS isn't the most efficient
thing in the world and needs lots of network bandwidth to get acceptable
performance. An alternative would be to bootstrap (possibly via HTTP or
TFTP) a root ramdisk then NFS mount /home. This would make app loading,
etc. much quicker while still providing the central administration
(reboot required at the client though) and central file storage for users.
You need a slightly more powerful machine at the client end, but I would
think that a PII with 128MB RAM is a decent baseline there.
That should be sufficient. I used a PII-300 (66MHz FSB) with 64MB of
RAM for a long time and it was quite usable, but I didn't try to use
something like KDE or GNOME. You might have to stick with a lighter
window manager like BlackBox or FVWM. I personally have more experience
with FVWM, but that choice is of course a personal preference.
>
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--MonMotha
