[ok-mail] [K12OSN] Scalability (long email)

[norbert]

Hi Terrell,

Thanks for the response. To answer why the twenty + client on terminal 
server, well it isn't by choice ! The school board has some applications 
that are a must and these only work with IE. I've tried;
Crossoveroffice  - it doesn't cut it for the applications they need !
Win4lin - is limited to Win 9x & is too expensive
VMware - I have not been able to get more than a couple of thin clients 
running with it & costs !!!

The applications are Edusystems, Kidpix (no Tuxpaint is not acceptable) 
& FirstClass (the linux local client works well but there is no server 
version yet.

Now the final "kink" in this problem is that there are non-profit 
organisations that give Win2K server & CAL licenses for free to 
educational institutions, so this is giving preference to a M$ solution 
as long as these apps cannot run with browsers on linux.

If you have any suggestions to avoid using M$ please let me know !

thanks
norbert

microman at cmosnetworks.com wrote:

> It wasn't my choice, unfortunately.  Back then I worked for not just a 
> Microsoft shop, but a totally rabid Microsoft shop.  The very notion 
> of running anything that was Free Software was total anathema to this 
> company.  They basically subscribed to the notion that, "if it *can* 
> run on NT/2000, it *will* run on NT/2000."  Actually putting 
> OpenOffice.org on anybody's computer might well have gotten me fired, 
> even if the user had specifically asked for it, unless it had been a 
> major partner (wasn't gonna happen).
>
> So, to answer your question, we never took them off of Microsoft in 
> the first place.  We simply made them run their apps locally again.
>
> That does bring to mind a question, though:  Norbert, can you tell us 
> why you need to run twenty client sessions on a Windows Terminal 
> Server?  Would folks not be better suited by a K12LTSP server?
>
> --TP
>
> Brian Chase wrote:
>
>> This must be why Citrix is so successful, because the native WTS does 
>> such a poor job of it.  What I can't figure out is why you took your 
>> whole office staff back to Microsoft when OpenOffice has been out for 
>> several years now.
>>
>> Terrell Prude', Jr. wrote:
>>
>>> That's one of the major problems with Windows Terminal Server; the 
>>> underlying platform's just not efficient.  The RDP protocol used 
>>> with it is reasonably efficient, but the server itself gets S-L-O-W 
>>> very quickly.  I never did more than five on a dual-PIII, 900MHz, 
>>> 1GB DRAM box w/ Ultra3-SCSI RAID, back when I was running Windows 
>>> networks, for performance reasons; with any more, the CPUs kept 
>>> pegging, and the memory subsystem kept almost continuously swapping 
>>> to disk.  As it was, there was plenty of swapping, and the CPUs were 
>>> heavily used.  We also had stability issues with user applications 
>>> (e. g. Microsoft Office).  We ended up using Terminal Services only 
>>> for us sysadmins and making everyone run MS Office on their desktops 
>>> again.  Boy, did we learn!
>>>
>>> If for some reason you have to do this for twenty clients on one 
>>> server, then I'd recommend going for, at a minimum, a four processor 
>>> box, with max GHz (currently we're talking either Xeon 3.2GHz's or 
>>> Opteron 2.2GHz's (that's the 848 model, BTW).  Also, better have no 
>>> less than 4GB DRAM, and more is definitely not overkill.
>>>
>>> --TP
>>>
>>> norbert wrote:
>>>
>>>> Ooops that's a P-III & just for clarification we're using K12LTSP 
>>>> with diskless client, from each client we launch a rdesktop session.
>>>>
>>>> thks again
>>>> norbert
>>>>
>>>> bear2bar at netscape.net wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> Hi,
>>>>>
>>>>> Has anyone setup rdesktop with linux on 20 + workstations ? (With 
>>>>> Win2K) and what specs are needed for the Win2K server to handle 
>>>>> the load.
>>>>> We've setup a P-II 500 Mhz with 512mb ram and can barely launch 3 
>>>>> connections. The response is incrediblly SLOW....
>>>>>
>>>>> thanks for the input
>>>>>
>>>>> norbert
>>>>>
>>>>> jhansknecht at hanstech.com wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>> On Tue, 2004-04-06 at 21:26, Shawn Powers wrote:
>>>>>>
>>>>>>  
>>>>>>
>>>>>>> snip
>>>>>>> I have 3 schools, all connected via fiber.  There are approx 30 
>>>>>>> classrooms per building, with a variation of 10 & 100mbit 
>>>>>>> connections internally.  The 2 big directions I'm looking at 
>>>>>>> would be to have 90 "mini-labs", where a teacher gets a new 
>>>>>>> white-box Pentium 4 computer, and have it serve as a classroom 
>>>>>>> LTSP server to 5 or 6 "junker" thin clients for the students 
>>>>>>> (much like the original case study Paul Nelson put up several 
>>>>>>> years back).  If the student management system won't work under 
>>>>>>> Wine -- that teacher computer would have to run win4lin or some 
>>>>>>> such solution.
>>>>>>>   
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Instead of win4lin think about using a Windows terminal server with
>>>>>> rdesktop. ....you will need to spend a little but I suspect you 
>>>>>> will be
>>>>>> able to conqueror this application requirement.
>>>>>>  
>>>>>>
>
>
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