[K12OSN] Diskless thin clients finding predators

[Alan Hodson]

Greetings

After having almost no 'predators' for number of years, the K12LTSP 
servers that I've run in the El Paso ISD (evolved to Centos5 servers and 
more recently to Edubuntu servers, all working via diskless thin clients 
from powerful servers with 4-8G RAM,) are being challenged and slowly 
killed by the Instructional Technology folks (predators) who insist that 
every lab must be a multimedia lab, running what amounts to MS based 
apps. The heavy flash sites that the district has chosen for training 
and tech applications, and the tests mandated by the State are making 
the thin client option a hard choice. Our new CTO wants true thin 
clients, but some of the MS specific apps can't deliver via Remote 
Terminal Services, so now we are looking into "fat" thin clients (!) 
with CE embedded, so part of the processing is done by the client, 
leaving some room for other services... We've even coined the term 
"yahooligan's syndrome"... see how many clients you can run from a 
server before nobody goes anywhere.

My brief saga is a call for experiences and solutions the members of the 
list have experienced. If there is a way to  run 30 sessions of 
Learning.com's EasyTech for instance from one of our servers, I'd love 
to know how the system was tweaked/set up. I've suggested small clusters 
of PCs and 3/4 thin clients as a possibility, but I don't seem to be 
making much progress. The Dark Side looms!

On a related matter, does anybody know if symbio-technologies is still 
around? Several emails I've sent have gone unanswered - I hope they are 
working on solutions to my problems.
Cheers
Alan Hodson
http://links.episd.org/
-=o=-