[K12OSN] Update on LTSP Booting Speed

[Lewis Holcroft]

Stephen,

I'm not sure why wyse came up as posible thin clients. I did some  
testing with them and found them quite problematic.
They are also expensive.

Others may have had better luck than I.

I have had to work with them in a windows environment also. They have  
a "feature" that looks for a server to download updates for the OS. It  
is responsible flooding the network with broadcast packets. I made  
three attempts to try and resolve the issue with thier support Dept.  
They could not tell me what caused the traffic. Much Googling got me  
the hint about the "feature".
I find I get much better support from the folks at  
disklessworkstations.com they even try to fix the problem.

Lewis

On Sep 13, 2008, at 4:42 PM, "Stephen Crampton" <SteveSings at gmail.com>  
wrote:

> Thanks so much to all of you who took the time to respond to numerous
> questions I have asked.
>
> I wanted to update you on what actions I have taken and what the
> status of the lab is.
>
> First, to clarify matters, the server I am currently using has two
> Athlon 64-bit processors, running at (I think) 2.4 GHz, and 4 GB of
> memory.  In addition to the built-in 100Mbps Ethernet card, it has a 1
> Gbps Ethernet card and an IDE hard drive.
>
> I installed K12LTSP 5EL.  By default the installer chose the Gbps
> Ethernet card for the LTSP clients.
>
> I'm using a managed switch that has 24 100Mbps ports and 4 1Gbps
> ports.  The LTSP server, of course, is plugged into one of the 1Gbps
> ports.  I went into the management web administrator and turned off
> the spanning-tree stuff.
>
> I have three old computers that seem to have no problem booting up on
> the system.  Also, I recently acquired a Nohrtec Microclient, Sr.,
> which boots off the system and seems to be capable of running blender
> over LTSP.
>
> I originally wanted 30 thin clients, because my class sizes get that
> big, however, it now looks like I will get 15 thin clients for the
> rest of this year.  Because of the school district's procurement
> policies, we are being steered toward Wyse thin clients, which I do
> not know much about, but which look like they might make capable thin
> clients.  I hope to have the thin clients within a few weeks.
>
> Until then, I have about 10 other computers at my disposal.  They are
> Lenovo ThinkCentre machines and I have been having problems getting
> them to boot on the network.  (I cannot touch their hard drives.)  It
> has been suggested that the problem is the tg3 module, but I'm not
> sure what I can do about it.  I tried adding NIC=tg3 to the default
> file and also backporting the ltsp-client, but to no avail.
>
> To make these 10 computers useful, I am currently trying to make a
> custom live cd to boot them.  I installed Fedora 9 on an old machine
> at home and livecd-tools.  For some reason, the process has crashed
> twice, logging me out in the process.  In both cases, the computer was
> unattended and it may be the problem has to do with power management
> (I'll try to disable it).  I wonder whether I can get the livecd
> platforms to log in and use the LTSP server's /home directory.
>
> To make blender and other applications run more quickly, I also want
> to figure out how to get them to run locally on the clients.  The
> clients are all powerful enough, even the fanless ones.  It seems to
> me that the ideal setup would have the LTSP server serve the operating
> system and applications to the clients and then let them do most of
> the work.  You would be able to have low-profile, energy efficient
> clients, but you might be able to serve a lot of them with one
> reasonable powerful server.
>
> Best regards,
> Steve Crampton
>
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