[K12OSN] Re: Openmosix & LTSP

[Sean Harbour]

>I've always thought the right way to handle this would be a slight 
>variation of openmosix where you could designate one or more dedicated 
>servers that could run applications for anyone but in addition, your own 
>applications would have the option of running on your local machine 
>(only - not other clients)if it offers a reasonable amount of CPU and 
>RAM capacity.   However I don't know enough about openmosix to know if 
>it actually has any concepts to associate users and their local 
>machines. You probably don't want your jobs running on some other client 
>that might be rebooted or unplugged at any time.  Something like this 
>could automatically balance out the differences between thin and fat 
>clients without much custom tweaking.

>-- 
>   Les Mikesell


There's another scenario that would effectively give most of the advantages of Openmosix, with
out the random shutoff penalties.

Configure the thicker thin clients as app servers, and limit connections to them from localhost only.
They could serve some of the bigger apps such as OO and Gimp via an NFS share from the main server.
The icon on the desktop would link to the local app server running on the local workstation.

No widespread problems if Johnny shuts off his client.

App startup would be more dependant on network speed and local cpu/ram, but it would help share the load over the thick clients, leaving more capacity for thin and thick clients on a single server. This would probably really help the slowdown issue of 40 thin clients starting OO at the same time.

I've never seen this done with thin clients, but it should be doable. The really interesting part is that you could use easily use the same technique to make dedicated network bootable "slave" application servers to boost the capacity of your existing K12LTSP server.

If anybody is working on this, drop me a line, I may be able to help.

Sean Harbour
sharbour at nwresd.k12.or.us
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