[ale] Seeking opinions on Terminal Server setup

Byron Jeff byronjeff at mail.clayton.edu
Fri Sep 23 10:55:36 EDT 2011


I've finally decided to make the move to a LTSP/Thinstation style thin
client setup and looking for some previous setup experiences. I have a need
for 2 or 3 workstations at the house and I've just gotten tired of managing
multiple machines. My hope is to collapse everything into a single server
and use these Wyse 941 GXL thin clients:

http://www.wyse.com/products/hardware/thinclients/941GXL/index.asp

which I picked up off Ebay for a song as the display frontend. The Wyse
thinterms work fine off a PXE boot and the 1Ghz VIA C3 along with available
PCI port makes it a usable frontend to drive high resolution displays.

So far I've been testing the thinterms with standalone bundles like
Thinstation and Slax. It does work, but since we're talking about a 1 Ghz
processor and max 1 GB RAM, it's a bit sluggish. What I'd like to figure
out is what is the modern way do to thin clients, and what cot effective
server hardware would adequately support up to 4 users. In the old days the
setup would be using the thin client as an X server which remotely
connected to the applications server. But with a ton of RDP protocols (VNC,
X, NX, RDP) what's the modern choice?

Second should clients be totally thin or is there better distribution with
a medium client that runs some apps (browser) locally and others remotely?

What's the most important parameters for the applications server? Number of
cores? Total available RAM? It's been so long since I've bought any CPU/MB
hardware I'm not really sure what's an effective basis for a comparison
anymore.

Any thoughts you can share would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks.

BAJ

-- 
Byron A. Jeff
Department Chair: IT/CS/CNET
College of Information and Mathematical Sciences
Clayton State University
http://cims.clayton.edu/bjeff


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