[plug] nis success story

[Gavin Chester]

On Wed, 2004-12-08 at 18:19, Sol wrote:
> > On Tue, 2004-12-07 at 21:10, Sol wrote

> > >From what you describe you are running "fat" clients to the server.
> > Yes?  Have you thought about running thin clients to reduce the admin
> > overhead?  Also, if you go "thin" most/all their older hardware could be

-snip-

> First of all, welcome to PLUG Gavin! :) 

Thanks!  A friend had recommended this list to me ages back but I never
seemed to get around to subscribing.  I'm fairly newbie, but hope I can
contribute eventually :-) 

> Yeah, we used to run thin clients on ridiculously pissweak hardware when
> we started out. The situation was so dismal that some people took pity
> on us and donated hardware. I'm not that familiar with LTSP (although
> I've read a bit about it) but whilst it might make my job as admin
> easier, I've found that user's like eye candy, ease of use and speed. So
> what we've got is kinda responding to demand. I think. ;)

I've been lurking and sometimes contributing to LTSP and K12LTSP for
about 18mths, and have learnt a lot.  The latter list is particularly
active, and both are friendly and very informative on many things
Linux.  For those interested the mailing lists are here: 

LTSP:
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/ltsp-discuss
K12LTSP:
https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/k12osn

For those not familiar or having had experience with thin client setups
as Sol has, please excuse me while I ramble on a bit about them:

When you go for centralised management, rather than a peering network,
the sysadmin job gets a whole lot easier, but it does require a beefy
server.  If you prune your software needs down and go for a light-weight
window manager running office apps then an old dual Xeon CPU PII 450
with 1Gb RAM would serve up to 10 clients without too much sweat.  A
fast workstation system (eg, PIII 2.8GHz with 1Gb RAM) would also do it
just as well for a handful of old PII clients.

If you want lots of eye candy and blistering performance, like Sol's
people, then you are looking at something like a dual Xeon CPU PIII
2.4GHz with 6Gb RAM. This sort of system would serve KDE to at least 20
old PII clients while giving lots of speed.  Anyway, the question of
server specs pops up regularly in both lists given above, so those
interested can get info from their archives.

There is an alternative scenario, of course.  Have "chubby" clients that
retain their hard disk/CD/floppy to be able to run apps locally after
authenticating against the central server and having the apps. dished
up.  That is a compromise if your server is not so good but your client
PCs are fast ones.  There is no software installed locally on the client
it just runs on the client, as needed, to unload the server. 

I'll be playing with a small family network of four old PII PCs hooked
up to an old dual Xeon CPU PII 450 with 1Gb RAM soon myself.  It's all
good fun!!

Regards, Gavin