LTSP

We do commercial ltsp solutions that solve a number of common ltsp
problems. I am not trying to sell you anything I am just going to point
out the common issues.

I love gentoo but realize that if you deploy that on servers it would be
in fairly bad taste to do the actually compiling on them and will not do
wonders for your performance. You will need to manage a separate system
or farm to do the compiling of the binaries and then rsync (or other
transport method) the packages over two the ltsp server. I am not de
facto against using gentoo on servers but that caveat is an important one.

I will not recommend a specific alternative distro but any of the RPM
based ones with apt-rpm or perhaps debian come to mind.

512mb is technically enough ram but ram is cheap and has a dramatic
effect on ltsp performance. I do not know that number of users you have
(starting at 6 but going to how many?, a good box with 1.5gb ram will do
30+ typical users) but going to 1.5gb is usually a very cost effective
solution. Just noticed you have RDRAM sorry not so cheap but something
to keep in mind.

Also I didn't see any raid mentioned but ltsp represents a monumental
single point of failure so even a cheap promise ata raid will help a
little in the event the disk fails.

Consider phoenix over mozilla your memory and processor with thank you.
Internet explorer has all of the same problems on linux that it does on
windows so keep that in mind.

In our experience customers vastly prefer evolution to kmail but YMMV.
PhpGroupware is in my opinion a truly atrocious hack of software,
consider horde (horde.org) with its accompanying calendar and other
modules instead.

I don't know what type of authentication you use on windows be it active
directory or old style domain but syncing is really troublesome. There
is a solution in almost all circumstances to authenticating against the
windows auth controller directly, google for you particular needs or be
more specific.

I assume you will be running quickbooks under wine or codeweavers? There
are some errata with that and ltsp, check the wine and codeweavers lists.

One very cool setup we have deployed lately for people in almost your
exact circumstance is to run the windows system inside vmware on the
ltsp box. obviously this requires beefy hardware but it takes server
consolidation to a new level and has proved quite useful in the right
circumstances.

Codeweavers is the best bet for providing windows apps in linux
directly, however using rdesktop and similar applications you can make
it appear as though windows apps are running under linux and that is
usually enough. Google for rdesktop, scripting and other hacks.

Most of the things we have added to our ltsp deployments are local
floppy/cdrom support, branded boot screens and logins for gdm so forth.
Lots of performance improvements. Boot progress screens (make it look
almost exactly like windows which may or may not be what you want). We
now also have customers looking for sound and have been able to do that
in our ongoing development. Google is your friend when it comes to ltsp,
there exists many patches and hack to the base packages.

Kernel/sysctl optimization can also usually have a large impact on ltsp
performance (or general linux performance) so read up.

If you compile openoffice yourself regardless of distro do so without
frame pointers (i.e. --fomit-frame-pointer) it makes the binary
significantly smaller (consequently using less memory) and does some
good things to the generally sluggish openoffice performance. You can
also compile OO without some of the junk you may not need.

Going back to the distributions for a moment without question redhat 9
offers the most intuitive desktop for typical office productivity. This
may be a point of contention with some but our usability research as
well as our customer demand and feedback has made that very clear to us.

Failover is a huge concern especially as you get past the 30 some odd
users mark. There are no really elegant solutions at this time but by
having raid and the likely faulty server hardware (disk, processor, mb)
backed up with parts you could limit a catastrophic event to less than
an hour downtime.

On the client end PXE is often more trouble that it is worth, cd,
floppy, or flash on ide are all things we have done in the past. The
flash on IDE is what I like the best but it does cost about $10-20 per
client. You can even get little headers that go right on the IDE
connector on the motherboard and just pop the flash onto that.

Feel free to drop me a note if you have other questions, duhlman at 50km
dot com. The community could also benefit if you were to case study you
situation and provide good documentation (even if you had to anonymize it).

Sincerely,
David Uhlman
CTO 50km Inc.

simply service wrote:
> I've just recently been approved to rollout LTSP and a Win2k terminal server. I wanted to run my plan by the plug list to make sure I'm not overlooking anything (this is my first time playing with terminal services).
>
> I plan to install Gentoo to replace our main server (which is currently running SuSe 7.3). The server is a 2.4 GHz systen with 512 MB of 1066 MHz RDRAM. Another system will have the same configuration, but with 1 GB of RAM for the Win2k terminal server. Most of the workstations on the Lan have a Realtek 8139(A/B) network card that is not PXE capable so I'm going to have to boot these with a floppy. Here is a list of software that will need to be available for this 6 user (more later) system:
> 1. Mozilla
> 2. Internet Explorer
> 3. KMail
> 4. Quickbooks
> 5. OpenOffice
> 6. Adobe Acrobat Reader
> 7. phpGroupware
>
> I am foreseeing a few problems and would like to know if anyone has any experience with these issues:
>
> 1. Linux to Windows password sync? (I know of "Services for Unix" package from microsoft, are there other options?)
> 2. Is there a better way to provide linux users access to windows applications? (wine isn't good enough).
> 3. Any problems I'm overlooking? I'm sure there are a few.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Jason Pfingstmann, CNA
> Systems Engineer
> Serendipity Telepresence, Inc.
> (480) 731-9510
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