[AuckLUG] Linux Terminal Servers

[Guy K. Kloss]

I've managed a project back in the late 90s for a company to set up terminal 
servers with diskless (network booting) thin clients all running Linux. The 
thin clients were allowed to be (somewhat) non-homogeneous, and could also 
have e. g. attached printers, etc. They (later) booted using PXE and ran 
almost all software on a terminal server cluster (3 machines for load 
balancing, 2 were needed for the load, so 1 was for redundancy). Local 
(parallel port) printers were integrated as network printers to all users. So 
the clients were running next to a minimal Linux an X server, Samba, SSH 
server, and some minor other little things. All these configurations were 
retrieved in a LDAP database to generate the bootconfiguration at boot time 
on the fly by the server.

The setup used mainly AMD K6-II CPUs with 32 and 64 MB RAM. Until 1 1/2 years 
ago (when the company was bought and everything migrated to Macs) still some 
of the old thin clients from the 90s were in service.

The software has been developed by a company now called "Gonicus". It's open 
source and available here: http://oss.gonicus.de/

The terminal server stuff is (I believe) now called GOto (in the /pub 
directory of the URL above).

I've got no affiliation with them, nor do I know how it would compare to other 
TS implementations today (to not use the Buzz speak "solutions" :-D)

Guy


-- 
Guy K. Kloss
Institute of Information and Mathematical Sciences
Te Kura Putaiao o Mohiohio me Pangarau
Room 2.63, Quad Block A Building
Massey University, Auckland, Albany
Private Bag 102 904, North Shore Mail Centre
voice: +64 9 414-0800 ext. 9585   fax: +64 9 441-8181
eMail: G.Kloss at massey.ac.nz  http://www.massey.ac.nz/~gkloss/
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