[luau] Re: diskless workstation

[MonMotha]

Comments inline.

Eric Jeschke wrote:
> 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.

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.

 >
>....
 >

--MonMotha