Setting up a file server for a diskless X-Terminal

[Les Mikesell]

Andy Green wrote:
> Somebody in the thread at some point said:
> 
>> I'd expect much better performance with the ltsp approach (running only
>> X on the client with the desktop and apps on the faster machine) than
>> you would have running the 2nd machine as a workstation with everything
>> mounted via NFS.
> 
> Another way to come at a "Diskless" machine nowadays is just to install
> Fedora on a USB stick (2GB will do fine) and use a common network
> filesystem.  That significantly reduces what is expected of the server
> box down to just pushing files around on demand.
> 
> Updating the USB images could be a drawback if you have many boxes, but
> if you have a network /home and no client-specific data on the stick,
> you can just nuke the sticks with a new image now and then.  There's a
> bunch of ways to split the client-local -ness of the deal with the server.
> 
> With the "dual-channel" USB sticks the general client performance is
> really good at no cost to the server.


This would depend on the age of the client machine.  A lot of older 
pentium, PII and PIII boxes only had USB 1.x interfaces which would be 
extremely slow, but most were capable of PXE booting and if they have a 
decent video card can be good thin clients.

The really, really, easy way to try it out is to install the k12ltsp 
distribution, which isn't a distribution in the usual sense but a full 
copy of fedora or centos, depending on the version, plus ltsp and some 
other stuff, on a server with 2 nics, and it will all come up working, 
doing dhcp/network booting only on one interface so as not to interfere 
with your main network.  There is a wiki here: 
http://www.k12ltsp.org/mediawiki/index.php/Main_Page but it isn't always 
up to date about versions.  If you poke around the download site
ftp://k12linux.mesd.k12.or.us/pub/K12LTSP/, the verions with EL in the 
name are centos based, the others fedora, and I think the fedora 7.0.0 
version is still under the testing directory.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com