[ale] Recommended Support Levels

[Charles Marcus]

> From: jeff hubbs [mailto:hbbs at mediaone.net]
> Sent: Friday, February 01, 2002 9:29 AM
> To: James S. Cochrane
> Cc: Atlanta Linux Enthusiasts
> Subject: Re: [ale] Recommended Support Levels

<snip>

> And, IMNSHO, it's *insane* to give most office users
> 1.4GHz desktops with 60GB drives (you KNOW it's happening!!).
> But, you can't BUY a new drive of less than 20GB anymore.
> This is a sign to me that desktop machines, as they are
> generally marketed and sold today, have no place in common
> networked business settings.
>
> What I would love to do is to put together an environment
> where desktop PCs were pretty much turned into X terminals
> but the users didn't know it or care.  A small group of
> "app servers" would do the heavy lifting - THAT's where
> the dual 4GB Xeons with the RAID arrays would go.  The
> desktops would go driveless (poof, never replace a
> desktop's drive again!) and boot over the network from a
> file server.
>
> One thing that this does is that the users can still run
> their P/120s from seven years ago and feel like they're
> just screamin'.  You wind up marginalizing desktop
> hardware; it's still *important,* but you don't have to
> CARE about it anywhere near as much.

Precisely!  This is why I like LTS (www.ltsp.org) so much.  It makes it
brain dead simple - and it works great (we have been using it for over a
year now at two offices).  One powerful server can easily support 50-100
clients - and even more, if the clients are powerful enough and we implement
'Local Apps', which allows certain apps to run locally on the Client (takes
longer to load, though) - great for problematic apps that tend to crash.
StarOffice, on the other hand, is perfect as a Net App because of the memory
sharing it employs.

With the added ability to provide access to legacy/WIN apps through
Tarantella/Win4Lin (and being able to demo this functionality right at the
Prospect/Clients office, even over a dial-up internet connection), we could
eliminate a *lot* of the resistance to migrating to Linux.  They could even
use their existing Win98 licenses (*everyone* has at *least 5 or 10 of these
laying around somewhere, no?).

> Now, this does mean that you still have to be able to
> afford some serious hardware, but you don't need to have
> anywhere near as MUCH of it.  You just have to be able to
> build a box that can run a hundred instances of StarOffice
> (might not want to run SETI at Home on those boxes)!  If
> you're really sportin' you might want to create MOSIX
> clusters or similar to serve out your primary user apps.
> Then, if you were watching the loads and things started to
> look a little tight, you could just put some more hamsters
> on the wheel.

There was some talk about incorporating mosix clustering with LTS, but I
don't remember if anyone ever reported back on it.  I'm heading over to
their list now to pose the question.

Charles




---
This message has been sent through the ALE general discussion list.
See http://www.ale.org/mailing-lists.shtml for more info. Problems should be 
sent to listmaster at ale dot org.