LTSP Advice

[Gerald Combs]

Jim Herrmann wrote:

> Here's the thing that sounded appealing to him, then he took it a little
> farther.  I told him about running everything on a server and just have
> some simple X terminals on each person's workstation.  I'm starting to
> look at ltsp.org, but thought I would see if any of you guys had any
> experience you could share.  The other thing he thought would be great
> would be if these terminals could all be wireless, including the
> printers.  Then the only wires that would be required in the office
> would be power.  That would be cool, but I'm not sure if the technology
> is there yet.

A recent Slashdot story linked to http://www.disklessworkstations.com/ .
 They specialize in LTSP gear, and list several different terminal models.

I'm not sure how well wireless would work for this applicaton.  X
Terminals and diskless workstations can be bandwidth intensive.  Enough
of them could easily overrun 802.11's shared topology.  Back In The Day,
it only took a couple of X Terminals booting at the same time to
completely saturate a 10 Mb shared LAN.  Switched 100Mb or gigabit
Ethernet (which is cheap these days) would give you much better performance.

This is giving me flashbacks of logging on to a VAX using an X Terminal
and _enjoying_ it.  If you'll excuse me, I have to go boil my brain in
Lysol now.