[luau] Re: diskless workstation

[Eric Jeschke]

On Thu, 13 Jun 2002 luau-request at videl.ics.hawaii.edu 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.

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.

There are have been a few articles on building this kind of system.  I
found Jamie Zawinski's article on the project he did for the cafe to be
the most helpful

http://www.dnalounge.com/backstage/src/kiosk/

Here are some other URLs that I collected when I was looking into this a
few months ago.  Sorry, didn't check to see if any are broken now.

http://www.naos.co.nz/papers/diskless/
http://hobbes.jct.ac.il/docs/Diskless-HOWTO.html
http://www.dahomelands.f2s.com/linux/diskless-howto.html
http://www.west-wales.lug.org.uk/doc/Web-Kiosk-HOWTO.html
-- 
Eric Jeschke
http://cs.uhh.hawaii.edu/~jeschke