[K12OSN] K12OSN Digest, Vol 80, Issue 15

[William Fragakis]

Jeff,
You pretty much covered what I was going to write about - seeing that a
handful of clients saturate a wired 10/100 link,  under current
technology, wireless would present more problems than it would solve. 

Someone else referenced an LTSP wireless solution which isn't really
ltsp so much as having a boot image on some sort of attached storage,
e.g. flash drive. While it would be relatively easy to set up a spin of
your favorite distro, say, with nm-applet configured to automagically
connect to your wireless, you are moving away from the true TC. You are
adding additional points of failure (bad/broken flash drive, need for
updating the image on the drive) not to mention that in a school
environment, the flash drives might learn to "walk" - go missing. 

On the freenx, are you using freenx as a client or nomachine's version
as the client? I use the nomachine version on F13 with no problem with
the freenx server. I believe the freenx client on late versions of
Fedora have been problematic.

regards,
William

On Mon, 2010-10-25 at 12:00 -0400, k12osn-request at redhat.com wrote:
> Message: 2
> Date: Sun, 24 Oct 2010 19:54:18 -0400
> From: Jeff Siddall <news at siddall.name>
> To: "Support list for open source software in schools."
>         <k12osn at redhat.com>
> Subject: Re: [K12OSN] Wireless - TC boot status
> Message-ID: <4CC4C72A.9040500 at siddall.name>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
> 
> On 10/24/2010 10:10 AM, Barry Cisna wrote:
> > Hello All,
> > 
> > Been out of the loop for a while now,in regards to wireless boot
> > possibilities for TC's. I have seen as of late several low cost TC's
> > that can be gotten with onboard wireless modules.
> > I'm not smart enough,but wonder if anyone would be able to figure
> > something out in a script to add to the rc.d folder of the ltsp
> > root,that would simply initialize the onboard wifi of the TC, and
> try
> > and scan 'the area' for any available AP,and connect to it
> transparently
> > at boot time of the TC.
> > This would be one more nice uncluttering feature of the classroom to
> > pitch TC's,,,:).
> > With the miriad of ever changing wireless onboard chips and changing
> > specifications,I am sure this would be a very big challenge to make
> it
> > actually happen.
> > Ideas?
> 
> The real issue with wireless LTSP is the bandwidth -- or lack of it.
> 
> It might be usable for a client or two but I suspect it would quickly
> fall apart as the number of clients grew.
> 
> The next issue is finding a way to get the wireless to run something
> like PXE.  I kinda doubt that works.
> 
> I have encountered the same wireless issue when trying to come up with
> a
> mobile thin client that could work across the internet.  I decided to
> use a minimal fat client (installed from a live CD) on the laptop that
> allowed the normal NetworkManager tools to find and connect to APs as
> well as firing up a VPN tunnel to the terminal server, then ran an NX
> client.  It has the side benefit of being a useful fat laptop in case
> the user doesn't have internet access.
> 
> Unfortunately I haven't been able to get freeNX to work on Fedora
> 12 :(
> 
> Anyway, if you find a solution please post it.
> 
> Jeff
> 
>