RE: [Sheflug] Terminal Services

["Morris, David (Allvac, UK)" <david [at] xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> On Sun, 2004-03-14 at 01:13, Alan Dawson wrote:
> > Theres been some discussion on the use of Linux terminal services
> > http://www.ltsp.org on this list before.
> > 
> > Is anybody using them, or know of any sites using them?
> 
> We use terminal services for our company computing, 
> centralizing maintenance. We use LTSP (which really means 
> Linux and XFree brought together with a few other necessary 
> services) and also tightvnc to access the terminal server. I 
> would recommend it for installations of 2 machines and up, 
> it's quite wonderful to maintain only one machine for all your users.

A word of caution. I'm planning an LTSP implementation on our shop floor
later this year and the problems we've had in testing almost exclusively
relate to network cards, as you'll see if you search the archives.

Simply, there's a problem with some network cards, NFS, and the way
(AIUI) they handle (or don't) fragmented UDP packets.

The symptoms are a complete refusal to pass beyond the NFS portion of
the boot cycle on the client. They get as far as "performing pivot_root"
and stop dead. Slowing things down on the LAN by running a tcpdump on
the server (daft, I know) seems to cure the problem, but it's not good
in a production environment. The best advice I've seen is to go for a
decent quality LAN card - Intel EEPRO ones are apparently good. I've got
some in but haven't progressed the testing any as yet.

-- 
David

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