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Thin Clients in a Computer Lab Environment?
chachi8 asks: "I work as a lab administrator in a university, and I currently look after about 500 Windows-based PCs spread out over 20 locations. The IT administration at my school has recently (and quite suddenly) decided that thin clients are a direction we should be pursuing, and I've been doing some research over the past few weeks. We've recently been visited by representatives of Citrix who basically showed us some really impressive software that is far from cheap. Because we're a university facing budget cuts, cost is a major issue for us, so what I'm interested in knowing is whether anyone has implemented a thin-client solution in a computer lab environment, and whether it turned out to be cost effective over a 3-5 year timeframe. Clearly, the idea of being able to add an extra few years to the lives of our lab PCs is very attractive, as is the thought of being able to centrally administer the software in all of our labs, but I'm as yet unclear as to whether the costs of servers and licensing (and everything else) will really result in a long-term savings in money."
it's like portable and thin
www.k12linux.org
Absolutely phenomenal. We installed it today and will be deploying it in a lab environment soon.
Not a SINGLE problem in install or setup.
- Nothing is true, everything is permitted
VNC is free and very flexible We use citrix where I work and have nothing but problems.
Check out netboot.
/
http://www.apple.com/education/hed/aua0202/iowa
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
The obvious anser is right here. That is assuming of course that linux is a viable answer. If you're talking Windows thin client (I hope you're not, since you did post this to /.) Citrix is your only real option.
There is no reasonable defense against an idiot with an agenda
:wq
I post this in the hope that it will avert all the uninformed "Can't you do this with VNC?" posts. I believe you can run terminal server on a SAMBA box, BTW, and there are even BSD clients for it.
However, make sure that it's a site similar to the one you are on; no point getting a business as a reference site for a uni.
Finally, if things don't go as planned post-implementation, point out to Citrix that you are educating the future decision makers of the world; if they perceive that Citrix is crap, they won't buy it in years to come. That should get them to help fix your problems!
Depends on what Windows applications you need. If none, consider using X for what it's best at. WINE might even help you out.
We basically traded a certain amount of time to the vendor or other business to underwrite it. As a result it was minimal cost, but there are times when the lab is only for their guests. You might look into sponsorships from Intel or Cisco, and even consider hanging ads or other ways to sell out to business to get funding.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I have installed LTSP and it works like a charm. No client maintenance issues. Can be booted from the NIC. And best of all it's FREE.
I've always found Linux terminals to work great. Quite honestly, though, I've found that trying to use a remote Windows machine with Citrix Terminal Server is not nearly as smooth, fast, or polished as Linux (or other UNIX) setups.
Sig (appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars)
Install Linux/xBSD and XFree86 on all the workstations and configure [k|x|g]dm to connect to a few servers. Instant thin client. As for the servers, Dual Athlon boxes with alot of memory running Linux/xBSD would do fine. If Windows is a must have, ignore this.
Pedro Côrte-Real.
I know a few years back at an Australian university we looked at thin clients for our computer labs. FWIW, the cost (Back then) of thin clients was about the clost of a Celeron computer, and did not come with a monitor either. The server (IIRC) had to have a whole bunch of memory (some 64mb per client, plus a very large overhead for windows + citrix), then they added Windows access licenses for NT on to each terminal that needed to access the server, plus NT client access licenses ... in the end it was just WAY more expensive than individual computers, even including total cost of ownership. However, I will re-iterate, this was some three years ago though... the scene has probably changed...
Video meliora proboque deteriora sequor - Ovidius
RedHat and the Linux terminal server project might be the way to go.
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
LTSP seems to work nicely from what I've seen, though I don't run a lab, I just played about with it. Seems good though, even supports Debian, Xf86v4 and Linux 2.4.x. The current thin-client poster child of Linux seems to be the City of Largo ... google around for that a bit, but that story basically details some stuff about their implementation. Hope that helped.
I always try to keep the thin clients in my lab. The fat ones just aren't any fun to experiment on, and potential clients are often repulsed by them.
Sunrays from Sun are the best and most popular choice. They have been deployed in many areas in the US and out including Canada and Europe.
--Metrollica
My university has experimented with thin clients, and has chosen to continue to use full PCs for the labs. The client boxes were nice, but they did not work as well and tended to be harder for them to keep running. Now the only thin clients they use are some Compaqs that they've placed around the school as email terminals. --These are actually very popular among students, as they don't have to fight for lab space just to check their email.
We use CITRIX in our school system for gradekeeping, office applications, science programs, kids programs, etc...
It is a wonderful product.
For thin clients, check out WYSE. We have some of these running Internet Explorer running CITRIX NFuse (citrix through the web browser) in our library. They work great card catalog software we use (Winnebago).
"In a cat's eye, all things belong to cats."
Its far from truely secure, not cheap by any means, and you need lots of really beafy servers to handle the load, plus extra $thousands for licenses for things like load balancing and more users. My current job is administration of both Citrix farms and Linux servers, and the school I attend uses neither. They have, however sucessfully stretched the IT budget with more then 500 fat-thin clients. Most of the labs on campus are diskless win98 stations booting off the network. Cyrix MediaGX pizza boxes are really nicely suited for this, as they can afford to stick 4-6 of these little things in each freshmen "living center" (which houses probably 100 students each). They almost never break, and have just enough CPU power to run (not incredibly fast) any normal app a student would be running.
Morphing Software
As a database administrator / designer working with imaging databases in a WinFrame Citrix enviroment, you might want to make absolutely sure all of your software will run before you buy. Some of our compilers and custom tools absolutely will not load or execute properly on the Citrix server, yet work perfectly fine on every other NT platform on the planet.
Weeeeeee. Oh yeah, and some apps simply will not run. WordPerfect2000 and some others come to mind.
Cheers,
LV
Woot w00t w007.
Not true. Check out Tarantella Enterprise.
Um, yeah, but how many clients can a NT/2K server running VNC host? A: Exactly ONE!
(Note that the poster referred to Citrix).
Ok, think about this, you can probably keep using the same monitors forever, and replace the PC for something like $500 and run all the apps you'd ever want to run in a computer lab. Now, start adding up the Windows licenses you'll need for each PC, plus the Citrix licensing, plus the monster server(s) you'd need to support 300 Citrix clients...
For ease of administration, use ghost to create disk images for each PC configuration. Something goes wrong? Wipe the PC and restore the image.
The thing is that hardware is getting cheaper by the day, software isn't.
-josh
Having a central Windows machine and thin clients for each of the users was a horrendous mistake. Whole labs spent as much time non-functional as they spent functional. Even having users change their passwords was problematic. Now, this was a few years back now and things may have improved. However, the only way I'd consider this is if the company you are buying the hardware from will guarantee uptime. This should be at least 99.9% uptime (and yes, this includes security patches and hardware failures), otherwise you are going to get crucified.
On the other hand, the computing science department also maintains several labs running OpenBSD for the client operating system. A student can log in to any computer in any lab because the /home directories are exported (over NFS, I think, but I could be wrong) from central file servers. The default software is installed locally so things can run very quickly but a large amount of additional software is also installed on central file servers and exported out to all the machines.
That setup is not bulletproof but the uptime is measured in weeks or months rather than hours or days. Depending on the year, it probably approaches 99.9% uptime. It also has the nice advantage of almost all of the software being entirely free.
So which should you go with? From my experience (ymmv), the clearly superior technical solution is to run OpenBSD on a large number of semi-thin client Intel machines. This is far more reliable than a competing Windows solution. From a cost perspective, there's really no comparison. That said, this assumes that you can migrate over to a Unix style environment. Not everyone can. Do not forget that you'd be throwing out all your Windows software using this solution. Also, you require sysadmins who are familiar with Unix. I assume this is the case.
Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia.
If you plan to use only Win32 clients and will have TCP/IP connectivity to all of them you might be able to get away with Terminal Services only, which is a little cheaper.
By the way, remote printing is a serious issue; look into it carefully.
Products like citrix are targeted to the business environment or low bandwidth use such as spreadsheets, wordprocessing, etc. (Where your screen updates are minimal) If you are going to do graphics, Citrix is not for you. Sound is okay, though Terminal Services (RDP 5) seems to have better sound. So what do you use those lab machines for? Simple office like apps, or programming, or graphics. That will dictate if Citrix, or anyother product liek it, is worth the money.
Accentuate the positive, don't waste your mod points on the negative.
I've seen their technology in use, and it is quite impressive. It is also very expensive though as you mention.
What I'd suggest is either since you are already using Windows get a Windows Terminal Server and use RDP. Just this week I used a RDP client for Linux, and it worked flawlessly (www.rdpdesktop.org), so client OS won't really matter all that much with a Terminal Server.
Alternately, you could get a nice Linux/UNIX server and run remote X sessions.
Either solution requires a competent Administrator, and a beefy server, but both are probably cheaper than Citrix's Metaframe (or whatever it was called) software.
I think LTSB is the way to go. At least that's what some of the other posters say. I don't know.
My company uses Citrix as a remote access solution, effectively the same thing as you're talking about, albeit over a greater distance (continental US). I've used it quite a bit from my home PC on the east coast connecting to the Citrix server on the west coast with no problems.
I don't administer the actual server, but from my understanding, certain groups are setup to see different applications: developers might see whatever development tools they use, remote sales folks see whatever tools they use, etc. Other things (access to Windows Explorer, the "Run" dialog box, etc. can also be locked down).
My experience thus far has been a very positive one. It's been a relatively quick connection as well, especially considering the distance. Unfortunately, as I didn't set the system up, I can't really provide anymore information than what I've said so far.
In terms of having longer lives for the current lab PCs, I figure as long as they can still run the Citrix client, there shouldn't be any problems.
--mh
Doing some quick numbers:
500 x $1500 = $750,000
500 x $800 = $400,000
plus say $100,000 for a small clustered server farm.
You still come out $250,000 in the black based just on hardware. But the real savings come because after 3 years you've got to upgrade/replace your workstations.. but your terminals will last much longer.
Factor in support costs for servicing 20 locations... even more savings. Of course you've got to make sure all your software runs on TS/Citrix; if your lab requires hardcore CS compiling, or bizarre custom applications as universities are natorious for, you might run into some trouble.
This may or may not be an option for your lab setting, but using X terminals as a thin client solution is a very cost effective solution.
You don't even need to modify your current machines, if you want to demo/test this solution. Make a bootdisk with a Linux kernel and a barebones X server (I know these will fit on a floppy because I've seen it done). Put one of these floppies in each workstation. Setup a fast machine with lots of RAM with a UNIX of your choice which will be the server that hosts all of your X clients (in other words, applications).
This solution is used in a lot of places, and X is one of the most mature, well documented, stable, inexpensive, [insert warm-fuzzies inducing adjective] thin client solutions out there.
Citrix MetaFrame is an amazing product, but you'll be stuck with Windows. That may be good or bad, I haven't decided yet... I'm not sure about educational licensing, but corporate licenses aren't cheap .. and you'll need some good central horsepower, with about 32MB for each client.
The good news is that your clients can be 386 and up with no perceptable performance gap, if set up correctly.
There was a story on slashdot where someone setup a network with a linux server and 486 desktops being used as thin clients. The apps came from the server and if a desktop went down, he could find replacements for real cheap..I will see if I can find the story..
http://www.sun.com/products/sunray/sunray1/
http://www.sun.com/products/sunray/sunray100/
http://www.sun.com/products/sunray/sunray150/
http://www.sun.com/products/sunray/software/
Management and security become a snap and you cut your electric bills to a fraction.
I don't think putting these machines in a lab is a good idea. Here's why: The cost savings is supposed to come from cheaper administration and the idea that thin clients aren't outdated as fast as thick clients. The sad truth is that thin clients are outdated FASTER than thick clients. If you take your 486 PC, you can run linux and a WinFrames client, you've got a system for the ages ;) But what if you've got a SUN NC? Good luck trying to find a good use for that. What are you going to do three years from now when the speed is no longer acceptable? What's your upgrade path?
With your "thin client" solution, you're paying a lot of money for low-speed hardware, so why not by cheap standard hardware instead and go with thin-client software?
I've worked at several places that deploy thin client solutions. There are a lot of very cool and neat things that can be done with thin client, and most of my experiences have been quite good. I've found that using thin client makes it very easy to administrate, and fairly easy to maintain, but there's certainly a few drawbacks. Depending on what you use, sometimes printer configuration can be a real pain, especially if you're going to have a local printer on a thin client device. The best route to go with printing is to use network print servers, it's much simpler and will be less of a hassle in the end.
:)
The main thing I would worry about with thin clients is security. Security is always very important, but now you're going to have multiple people all sharing one machine. The network at our local college was completely open - we had students browsing other student's directories and stealing their work.
Also, as already suggested, there are alternatives. Citrix does put out very nice software, I've had first hand experience with it, but there are other nice packages. Windows 2000 Terminal Services is really not bad, we've got it deployed here at work for remote access. I'll probably get a beating for mentioning it, but I believe Citrix runs on top of it anyway. If you have newer clients, Win2K TS supports printer redirection, too. The only advantage we've had with Citrix is local file redirection; if you're running thin client devices, this isn't even a consideration. I haven't had much experience with VNC or other free alternatives, but I'm sure someone here can point you in the right direction for that, as well.
Why not use Linux?
Last time I checked, it was free.
I still am in awe of what our CIS department has done at Ohio State. They handle something like 200 thin clients, plus all the remote sessions.
Basically, you sit down at an old, stripped down HP-UX machine or a thin client that allows you to log into one of their servers. NT and Solaris are the typical flavors--I can't remember what the other option was. Plus, if you log into the Solaris box, you can open a Citrix client and use that to be logged into an NT server. This is really nice for writing code in UNIX land, but using MS Office for the documentation.
I would just love it if the EE department could get a clue and do something similar. It really would give us the best of all worlds. Oh, and you can read more about the CIS setup here.
Long, cute, or funny Sigs are just another form of over compensation, used by geeks, nerdz, etc.
I've been working on a Thin Client TCO for a few weeks that's just about finished. It's showing consistently greater than 50% TCO savings after two years. Of course, your TCO will depend mainly on the cost of the software you run the lab with. I'd say use Linux, but that's just my opinion. Also, the clients I examined have hard drives, which means they aren't quite so thin, but ones with no hard drives would have an even lower TCO, as maintenance wouldn't be much of an issue. Whatever you decide, if you go with thin clients, you have to get the software issues right from the start, or it'll all go to hell later on.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Microsoft also licensed the technology and called it Windows Terminal Server. If I remember right it is already a part of their Enterprise offerings. It's been a long while since I looked into this. A few years ago we used to demonstrate Citrix Metaframe and it really is impressive. If you go the MS route maybe they'll set you up for free or at a steep discount since you are an edu?
'mmmmmmmmm.... forbidden donut'
We've never used thin client in a computer lab environment, but many of our customers use thin client. It's my understanding that it makes management of 1000s of computers a *lot* easier, but commonly does not save any $ on hardware investment. The cost of the Citrix licenses and hardware can make up for the savings in client hardware. The TCO can be lower if you do things right, though.
Most of the customers who have switched to thin client don't regret their choice.
-- Erv Walter
Your main reason for the thin-client push seems to be the software administration ease. Do it this way:
Create an image for each different hardware combination. Hopefully you don't have that many different combinations. Free imaging software exists for this task - see here.
When creating these images, lock down the machine as much as you can before image creation. For windows, this means file permissions and registry permissions. Look at Microsoft's Zero-Administration Kit. Also look at customization kits for Office and IE - these will also allow you to lock the machine down at a fine-grained level. This will keep people from screwing things up! The more time you spend fine-tuning your lockdowns the less time you'll have to spend re-imaging machines.
Good luck!
Recently I deployed a thin client solution using Tarantella from www.tarantella.com.
It works great using a webbrowser or the native client.
By using RSA securid I have been able to securely deploy both windows and unix applications to users on the internet. There are native clients available for windows, linux and Solaris
The big advantage is that you only need a windows terminal server for your windows applications. By moving as many applications as possible to Linux you can save a lot of money.
Regards Kenneth
Yes, but she's a lawyer, not a client!
Sheesh, ruins the whole joke that way.
I would like to just take a moment to say : "HELP! A dingo ate my baby!" thank you
Everybody is already refering to the Linux TS project, but here is a related project: a HOWTO for diskless Windows Terminal Server thin clients, based on Linux. It may be a lot of work, but it seems to me that once you have gone through the trouble, rolling out new terminals will be a breeze.
-------
Warning: Slashdot may contain traces of nuts.
There is two options that are cost effective
1. Linux Terminal Server Project. This will serve linux desktops over a thin client solution. LTSP.org
2. Linux Terminal Server pushing to Windows ?? Terminal Services. The program that does the magic is RDesktop. It is a UNIX implimentation of the RDP protocol used by Windows. There is a guy doing this in a project located at Wilisystem. It basically uses LTSP to boot the clients and passes the rest off to Window$. You still need client access licenses for Windows in this scenario.
As far as cost effective, nothing could be more cost effective. Think about it, do you want to admin 500 PC's or a few servers and 500 terminals. When a terminal has a hardware failure you throw it away since the box itself only costs about 300 bucks as opposed to 800 to 1000 for a useable PC workstation with disks. We do this terminal stuff all the time at my work.
-- 4 8 15 16 23 42
Hi folks,
In my current and previous jobs, I've been in charge of small Citrix server farms. The pros are:
* You can continue to use 'cheap/old' hardware to connect and the backend servers just need to be fairly beefy.
* There's a Citrix client for almost every platform out there - if it can run java, it can run the Citrix client.
* It works okay over a 28.8k connection and can be really zippy over a 128k connection or better.
Cons:
* Graphics-intensive apps -- do *NOT* do this over Citrix. Bad. Very bad. Performance will more than suck.
* One or two users can max out the Citrix server's processors depending on what they're doing.
* You absolutely positively have to know what your applications will be doing server-side otherwise you'll hate your setup completely.
That's my advice from the field...
Check out the NICs. At $199 a pop, is probably the cheapest thin client there is. Runs linux from a cdrom.... very easy maintenance. The bundled software includes vnc and citrix. http://www.thinknic.com/
Our University, Griffith UNI, AU Uses 2yo PC's for student common use computer labs. Our UNI has trouble keeping a SQUID server up and running so i hope they don't make any drastic changes like this. Our enrollment software server falls over all the time, The server that serves our timetabling info is rarely up when you need it.
You guessed it, The computer policy is Windoze, Although the system programmers are starting to implement their own policy based on RedHat.
Where I work (I know not a UNI environment) uses thin clients - everyone hates them because they are so slow. The same company uses pIII computers to run windows software to control Gas Chromatographs. Talk about major overkill.
How good is your current network infrastructure? How many of those drops are 10 Megabit? 100 Megabit?
What it the current backbone, what kind of interfaces can you put in the Servers to feed the clients?
There can be a lot of hidden network problems and costs when setting this up beyond a local switched lab environment.
It is well known that the Apple is the #1 educational computer. This is because it is far and away the most successful computer in schools, and in a school environment, the Macintosh Apple can't be beat.
I am working in a similar situation, where I want to allow a large amount of users access to the thin clients, using web browsing apps, and office applications, but my question is, at what point does load managing become an issue of which machine the user is working from. IE, at 100 users should you get two servers, or what have you.. at what point does a single server not become efficient/suffecient?
think before you write, it'll save me moderator points.
Figure out your annual costs to support the network as is for 3 to 5 years. Software + labor + security (virus software) + hardware. Root out ALL the costs, don't ignore anything ("Oh, we only pay work/study students $8 an hour, it's not important") and any impact down time may have. Call up some locations which have already implemented the solutions you are looking at, approx. the same size and also academic institutions, and see what their costs are (it's not like you are in direct competition).
Get a spreadsheet of the current cost of doing business vs. the solutions you are looking at so you can show it to mgt.
I think, however, that getting away from a PC/Windows based system is the correct solution. Gartner Group once published a study stating that the cost of supporting a PC based network was up to $10k/yr in some situations. Sure the software *looks* expensive up front, but over 3-5 years moving to thin clents would probably be a great idea.
But run the numbers first, get competing companies and their products in the door and let them make their best presentation. Make sure they know you are looking at 3 to 5 year costs, not just initial purchases, because PC/Windows always *looks* cheap when you do not factor in the add-ons and support.
Then decide.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
If you decide to go for the MS route, basically you have 2 options: Citrix or Terminal Services. TS is built into Windows 2000 server, so make sure that you would really benefit from the additional features of Citrix before you spend extra on it. Note that there are also additional client license costs for TS. Note also that TS client is not available for as many platforms as Citrix.
VNC will not provide a multiuser envirnoment like citrix (read the FAQ for VNC, they are very clear on that.) However, in a UN*X environment, there is a way to get Xvnc (part of VNC) to act as Citrix, through inetd. It works, and the proformance is fairly reasonable. The website is http://www.dei.isep.ipp.pt/~andre/extern/ixvnc.htm
Again, this would not be helpfull in the case of a Windows environment, but if you ever consider linux, this may be helpful to you.
Accentuate the positive, don't waste your mod points on the negative.
I got to Cal(UC berkeley) and we have a couple labs full of SunRays, which I have found great from a user perspective. Now, the thing you're not going to beleive is why. The sunrays are silent. You never notice how loud the fans from forty computers in a lab are untill you walk into one that's quiet. It's much easier to think for long periods of time. The labs are about 50/50 divided between unix pc's and sunrays, and I'll only work on the PC's if I have to, though the (computer desktop) environment is identical.
There are some disadvantages with sharing a Big Computer with a lot of people, but overall the plusses seem to outweigh the minuses. Last year about halfway through the semester the workload increased on the servers and everything slowed down... This was the bad part. The good part was that a month later, they added another server, switched a number of the clients over to it, and everything jumped back up to speed. If these had been PC's that weren't cutting it any more they would have had to be replaced.
I have no idea what they've gone through on the administrative level, or if Sun gives us a good deal or not. They deployed a new lab last year, so they must not hate them...
I'm the IT department here at this company. I researched this through and through. I went with Wyse 3360se's and *cough* Terminal Server on Win2k. It's cheaper than PC's. There is only one computer to maintain. The work without crashes, slowdowns, or sysadmin involvment.
We will be implementing Citrix here in a week. I've gotten to know it too, and for a lab, I'd use TermServ. Get to know the RDP protocol because ICA runs on top of it. This follows the first rule of software use... Know thy code foundation. Citrix has it's benefits, but they are most felt when running applications remotely from a PC.
--- "1.21 Jigawatts!" -Doc
Since you already have to buy a terminal services license to use citrix the question should be if citrix offers any advantage. We use both for our remote locations and they both work about as well. The real advantage is not having to build multiple machines. Oh, citrix does have a web interface I think.
my hobbies include space walks, ether chugging contests and marathon sleep contests.
If you are on a budget of less then a couple million dollars then you can forget about citrix, unless meta frame has made some serious improvements in the past 6 months, let me tell you why.
first of all the recomended amount of memory per user is something like 16- 32 MB of ram per user ON THE SERVER, that means that if you want to support 500 users and if you only used to 16mb of memory per user then just to support the users you would need 8 GIGs of ram not to mention the 128 to GIG or ram for just running the OS, not to mention the price of the server that supports that much ram and the price of having between 4 and 8 Zeon procs and then the arrays you would need to store all of the information on that system, something like VNC or some other solution would be more evective, its hard to say what though, thats just my 2 cents
Jon
I've worked for/with three companies that implemented Citrix, and although I wasn't involved with the actual figures, I did notice some significant issues.
First, we notice performance problems with Citrix. Granted each time it was a graphic intensive program that was being hosted, but then that could also be an issue in your lab.
Second, Security maintenance was actually much more complicated than with standard PCs.
Third, unless the clients where at a great distance (across the US in some cases), there was no actual gain in version maintenance. When we had 40 PCs in the same building as the server, we quickly discovered it was easier to install updates from a network share rather than get all of the DLLs on the Citrix server configured, and it took a lot less experience to accomplish the workstation updates.
In all three cases I worked with, they are still trying to realize a cost savings and its been greater then five years for each!
----------- Sig what?
rdesktop page
It's very easy, of course, to set up linux as a thin client. X -query someserverhere works well.
K12linux.org is a great site for info and their Red Hat Distro. I have meet Eric and Paul a few times, really great people. They have developed quite a following because they are making implimenting a thin client setup really easy.
K12ltsp is based on www.ltsp.org which is in version 3.0 right now. I use this software to set up computer labs in non-profits in and around Portland. We are a NP ourselves) It is gaining maturity, system administration is barely more work than working on a box running programs locally. You need to have DHCP running on the server, TFTP setup, and allow it to serve applications to remote X-Clients, and that is about it.
Here are some links for further reading on what others have done.
umn
olinux
solucorp
askslashdot
gbdirect
tucows
XDM
There's plenty of room at the bottom.
I don't know if VNC will work in your environment, but so, do it. Citrix is the "official" client, but not loved. VNC has become the dirty little secret of telecommuting where I work. Add a VPN and it rocks!
Concider this:
/$ on things free software can provide without terminating support for all win32 stuff people realy (seem to) need.
- LTSP can indeed cover most email, www staroffice and other comon tasks very well.
- Some win32 stuff can be supported with Wine.
- Citrix clients running on LTSP can provide you with most other win32based stuff.
- Citrix can be used to publish complete desktops but a more cost efficient way is to use it for some applications only. The citrix client will provide a seamless window of the published application running on another server than the one generating you desktop.
So why invest in a 100% citrix solutions if you can use it only when free software doesn't provide a proper solution. This will probably be a very minor part of your current set of supported applications so you won't spend lost of
i'd say: go for a hybrid solutions!
The machines in some of the labs at my school are thin clients, and they're useful to about the degree needed for what you'd expect students to do. Email, word processing, and menial programming.
Just my two cents.
My old school (the University of Waterloo) did this as a matter of course. The Math faculty (which housed the CS department) was mostly Unix-based (with some Macs for the first-year students) and when the old VT-200 clones got too moldy, they replaced them with X-terminals--er, I mean, "thin clients". They started out as NCDs but other vendors also provided their batches of them.
IIRC, they had about ten admin people for the whole thing, which was considered really impressive, given that there were three different computer architectures in use running mostly transparently as "CPU servers". When you logged on, you got XTerms on one or more of them. It was typically the same one but they could change without notice on you. This usually worked because all the GNU tools were compiled on all of the machines. If you really needed to use a particular machine, you could still rlogin to it--all machines NFS-mounted the users' home directories.
Anyway, it worked pretty well most of the time. The only major problem was that on occasion, the NFS server would get confused and render some or all of the network unusable. This got really, really annoying at 3 AM when you were trying to do an assignment and the admins had gone home. They eventually got a Network Appliance dedicated NFS server for the student accounts, which helped things a lot.
The X-terminals were pretty long-lived, too. I bought one of them recently from the University some 6 years or so after I'd last used one of those.
They have thin client at the college I go to based on NT terminal server. It's horrible to use but yeah it's cheap cos any old 486 will work with it as the server does all the work and just sends the screen image across the network. Did I mention it's slower than winXP on a P100 yet?
My CS dept. used Sun Rays linked to an E5000 machine with sixteen processors. And while, most of the time, this machine supported 30 or 40 concurrent users, when people were doing some assignments, it was downright aweful.
For example, when the CS Theory class was implementing their Kruskal sort in C++, lots of them kept hitting these infinite loops that would keep creating new objects, and with 20 or 30 people doing this, every few minutes, everybody's machine would grind to a halt while the renegade process swallowed up 4 or 5 gigs of memory. It was immensly annoying and made it impossible to get my work done. I don't know if Solaris would have allowed them to implement CPU quotas, but I know that i always ended up moving to the Intel machines.
I'm a Cali College admin and am currently installing a solaris solution.It's a E450 and 70 SunRay thin clients.The E450 has a web app to control the SunRay sessions with.We are using CDE for the desktop,but you could grab some SunPci Cards and run M$ (yuck) terminal services.HighSoft has a buy one get one deal on all compenents of a education lab,so for about 110K we got 2 E450's and 70 SunRays.
Citrix is a really cool program.
We use it at my work here in Germany, I have no idea of the cost of the central server program but the clients are free and they run great. I use it on Debian on they are uber speedy, all the rendering is down client side so the bandwidth needed is minimal. My only complaint is the way it handles animated gifs on webpages, they really slow the client down. But excel et.al. have no probs
One note though is that microsoft requires licenses for each machine(unique ip) that connects to there servers but apparently this only costs about 5 dollars per machine
IMHO: buy it
I work at a General Electric facility where we recently changed MMS systems to a citrix-driven system, and let me tell you that it is SLOW. A big honking Sun machine powers the Oracle backend, but the user interface runs on Win2k advanced server. On a p2-3xx with 64mb ram and win95, the interface is visibly slow. Another problem we have had is with printing -- the server is supposed to map your printers, but we find that PCs with more than one available printer either won't print, or print to random destinations.
My understanding is that the "thin client" is supposed to save in hardware costs, which it MIGHT. The software costs, however, can't be that much lower unless you use the Linux citrix client. You still have to pay your Microsoft tax for the OS, and then you need NT CALs, and licenses for Office (which I assume will be the major app used). I just don't see the benefit. Citrix is selling buzzwords and hype with terrible performance.
Universities have enough problems with bandwidth, imagine having to share all your applications over that pipe with all the mp3s and video traffic!
First, let me start by saying that for specific applications, Citrix is great. It can do a lot of neat things. However, like many software packages, it is sold to meet whatever needs you have.
I worked for a while for a company that was setting up Citrix and selling the service to K-12. We had Citrix experience in-house, and the ability to put together enough hardware to render a movie. However, it just proved cost-ineffective when compared with other options. Citrix has very high costs that are not always obvious. It has never been called "easy to administer", and companies often have to hire Citrix consultants at least to do the initial setup.
I assume that you are running Windows, and that it isn't an option to switch to Linux. If I'm wrong, well, look at the LTSP posts. However, if I'm right, you can save a ton of money. The only thing preventing many schools from doing this is the stupidity of the IT managers.
0. Hire students, train them to replace hardware.
1. Dump Dell, Gateway, etc. PC hardware is a commodity, so why pay a premium? The usual reason is that "that's how a business is run." Businesses are typically run poorly.
2. Schedule everything around rotation and disposal. Don't throw out machines, cannibalize parts when you can. Have your student employees scavenge everything. When you do buy new, buy not-quite-state-of-the-art (not old, mind you, but do a price/performance graph of, say, processors, and you'll see a leveling of the curve; buy what's at the bend of the curve; this should take 2 minutes in a spreadsheet, yet it isn't done very much).
3. Don't replace monitors. This is such a boneheard maneuver. Typically, the reason given is that "they're so cheap now." Ugh. Your current monitor is free. Same goes for peripherals, keyboards, mice, etc.
4. Dump the expensive shared drives. They're nice, but no student ever said, "I'm not going there because I have to drag a disk around." Stick a zip drive and a CDROM burner in each PC, and stick a vending machine with zips and cdrw's in the lab. Hardware-wise, this might be more expensive (although it usually isn't), but hardware isn't the big cost for shared-drive servers. Software and maintenance and support contracts, etc., will be the expensive part. Local drives are virtually maintenance-free.
5. Don't buy a maintenance contract on anything! This is important; it's where companies make their profits, because the margin is so high. So what if you know some parts will fail? Chance are they'll fail under mfg. warranty, so you won't have to buy a new one. The usual response is, "it's only $200" or "but we need a contract for our $80,000 whozits". The first is silly, $200 is more than any single part in the whole machine. It also typically buys you service that doesn't exist; no one ever comes to your home or business within 24 hours, if ever; they don't make money doing that. As for the second, what are you doing with an $80,000 whozits? $80,000 is for supercomputers (beowulf Linux, of course). Get rid of it.
Most computer labs have a "burdened cost" per PC of over $4000/yr, including support. This is patently ridiculous. Before buying/buying into any system, including mine, figure out what your burdened cost is, then ask if your grandma could do better without any help. If the answer is yes, well, look for other options.
One of my favorite profs once said that all you need for a university is a room, some chairs, faculty, students, and a photocopier.
Right on, right on.
-Josh
Ask your supervisor what the functional requirements of the thin client network are. There is no one answer to their question without a LOT more info.
Thin Clients can be very useful in an environment, or they can be crap. The only time I've ever seen a sensible business case for thin clients is this:
A main office with several remote offices needing to run a bloatware database app that requires lots of data bandwidth. Typically the main office has good computers but the remote offices are staffed by 3 or 4 morons (i.e. nontechnical users) and they have PCs ranging from a new Presario w/WinXP the manager bought to a clone Pentium Pro running Windows 95. This is where Citrix shines -- they run the app on the Citrix server and a 56k modem can handle the screen updates on their end.
There's another place where Citrix is useful, and that is to web-demo your software. You publish the app, embedded in a web page, and tell your customer to go to http://demo.html. Then you shadow their session from the Citirx box, and you're both looking at the same screen, clicking the same icons, and so forth. This is a great way to demo a product and I'm surprised more companies don't do it. (That's what we use it for at work, it's very easy to set up too.)
That being said, I don't think a computer lab fits into either scenario too well. Maybe if you have low bandwidth links between the remote labs and the servers it would make sense, but why not spend your money on a better link? The licensing costs add up pretty quickly, although one thing to note is that Windows 2000 Pro (not sure about XP Pro) includes a Terminal Services CAL. The Citrix CALs are pricey, as is the citrix server itself. (last i checked about $3K for MetaFrame 1.8 w/15 CALs).
I haven't looked into this, but I think Windows 2000 Terminal Services have come a long way since NT4 TSE. I was reading just the other day that they can now publish an application in a web page using ASP, providing the same functionality as the Citrix web-demo I talked about above, for $3000 less. (Technically Citrix can do it using ASP or java, blah blah blah.)
A large portion of whether it's worth pursuing thin clients comes down to how old/disparate is the HW in your labs. If they are all PII 266s it might be worth looking at, however my computer at work is a dell PII 350 laptop and it's absolutely fine for running Win 2K and office xp. I have another user running Win XP, Office XP, and ACT (all resource hogs) on a PII 266 with 64MB RAM -- no complaints. Computers are so fast now that unless you really have junk, or junk from twenty different vendors, then you probably dont' need to upgrade them anyway within the next three to five years.
As for centrally managing software, that is a big plus. It's a nice benefit of Citrix but it's not the primary function. If managing apps is the reason for deploying thin clients, I'd look at something like SMS, which is a lot harder to set up but is much cheaper and addresses that problem specifically.
--Hey Taco, can I just send you $5 in the mail, and then block all the ads with proxomitron?
"We've recently been visited by representatives of Citrix who basically showed us some really impressive software that is far from cheap."
Citrix always seems like a good solution but ends up being a bear to maintain. Always something going wrong.
I wouldn't touch it with a 10 foot pole.
All you need is something that will run a vt100 emulator, and a shell account with vi. What more would you need?
Of course, there is one question that must be asked: What, exactly, will these clients DO?
I ask, because my university uses a blend of computers -- for different uses.
We have many, many Linux 'kiosks' (essentially HTML/Web TC's), which are scattered around everywhere; They are used for email / web access. They are scattered all over campus, hanging from a wall in a similar way a payphone would. (Complete with plexiglass to allow visibility, but discourage theft).
They are a hit, and serve their intended purpose extremely well -- a fair number of students were clogging the computer labs just to check their e-mail. This allowed students who needed a 'real' computer to use a computer lab to do their homework, whereas those who just want to check email simply walk up to a kiosk & login.
Linux-based TC's used in this way are great -- but only for their purpose.
So consider exactly what the thin-clients will be used for. At a university espescially, there are a great many apps where old PC's can be converted into Linux-based thin-clients, prolonging their lifetime and being easier on the budjet.
-- Sometimes you have to turn the lights off in order to see.
If you have to stick to Windows, take a look at the terminal services features built into Windows 2000.
The server needs to be Win2k but the clients can be any version of windows box from Win3.1.1 up. I've found it to be quite fast and maintainable (as I use it to work from home).
Believing something doesn't make it true. Not believing something doesn't make it false.
My college (NCSU) uses cameras in some places, but optical alarm wire in all labs. It's just a fiber optic cable run through a lock bolted on to every computer, and it signals an alarm if any part of the cable is broken. Quite effective at preventing anyone from taking a whole system (although the problem of swapping out CPUs is still there...), and the cost is linear (per lab); it can protect 10 systems or 500 systems (cost of 20' cable vs. 300' cable is relatively small).
Of course I'm guessing at the price, I didn't pay for it. But it seems it would be cheap. :)
I've been supporting Thin clients in our labs since back when NCD was selling WinCenter on top of Winframe on top of NT 3.51. (about 5 years) Our mandate was to provide the Windows apps in the lab, UNIX was not an option.
When it works, it is great! I'd rather have a lab full of thin clients than a lab full of PCs running Windows. The ability to contol the computing environment, configure the software for everyone, quick updates...all just by working on the server. Not to mention the ability to upgrade the entire lab just by upgrading the server. The students knew that each "machine" in the lab would act the same - no surprises after logging in. NCD also provided us with a utility that allowed the NT servers to query our NIS+ server for account information, heck, it even allowed SAMBA to automatically mount their home directories.
But remember the application software - all these PC programmers are still thinking each user has their own machine - writing files to funny places, popping in registry keys in funny places, gobbling up memory, etc. Some apps don't play nice in the MS terminal server environment.
We also ran into issues with Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and some stats packages - they would run, but far too slow to be useful. When we switched to Windows 2000 from the NT+Citrix mix the clients were limited to 256 colors. Too few to keep the map makers happy.
A different department on campus had a terrible experience with Citrix when using old PCs as the "thin client" but their problems seemed to stem from a lack of training for lab monitors and users that didn't understand the difference between running an app on the local desktop machine vs. logging into the central server. As we had Xterminals to start, then Windows Based Terminals (yuk) in our labs we didn't have that problem.
I ended up pulling the thin clients from the lab and installing new PCs but that was more a political decesion by our new Dean than a technical one. Now all our GA's and some staff have thin clients in on their desks where most use them for Email, MS Office, and web browsing - and they work just fine.
For non-demanding apps you may be okay, remember to double whatever specs Citrix gives you. Only use Citrix if you *have* to. If you must offer Windows apps to thin clients you may be able to use what is built into Windows 2000 w/o the Citrix add-ons. I have a low opinion of Citrix since getting caught in the middle of the licensing battles between them, Microsoft, and NCD. Held up my upgrades for over a year, removed loads of functionality from the product, cost lots more money. I was happy to leave Citrix behind.
I miss having the old Xterminals in the labs, heck, I even miss the NCD Thinstars in the labs, but we'll be setting up the PCs to dual boot...
If you want to centralize administration, and don't really care what happens underneath that, why not just maintain a reference Windows machine, take drive images, and re-image the drives of the lab machines (over the network) on a weekly basis?
There's software available to automatically do this for NT-based systems (a few parts of the university I'm at do that). Or, you could set up a few shell scripts on a small *nix partition on each machine to do the same thing.
You'd have to make sure that you had only one or a small number of hardware and software configurations throughout the labs, but that tends to happen anyways (machines are bought en masse, and there are only a few departments you're responsible for).
I'm not sure what a thin client solution would buy you over this, and it would introduce additional headaches (having to maintain a very powerful server to serve all of the clients, for one thing).
I would like to begin by saying that, although I'm not a huge M$ fan, Citrix\Windows NT\TSE or Win2K are a great solution...if you can afford them. For the most part, they work as promised.
Now for the good and the bad. The costs might be hidden. Let's assume that you use thin clients. Your cost will be $4000\server for Citrix + $4000\server for Windows 2000 advanced server + Windows CAL (I forget the cost) + a Windows Workstation license for each client that is not running Windows! This is NOT a concurrent license, by the way. Now, if you can pay that kind of money you will love the benefits offered by Citrix\MS products. The combination is a piece of cake to administer once it is set up. We have 600 clients and 20 terminal servers and could probably cut 2 of 4 techs (now that the system is running) and at least 1/2 administrators. It's very stable once it is actually set up properly.
That cost is hideous, but you WILL need some legacy app support. Let me suggest something more useful. There is an ICA client for Linux. Set up several Linux terminal servers to handle the bulk of your user load, using Linux clients. Install the ICA client on those machines (or the Linux terminal servers) and use those ICA connections with 1 or 2 Citrix terminal servers for running "must have" windows apps. Now you have the best of both worlds. You might also look into Samba\Winbind for unifying logins between systems. Please feel free to contact me with any questions.
If you are serious about thin (e.g "diskless") clients, take a look at bpbatch. It an interesting diskless boot loader.
http://www.bpbatch.org/
BpBatch is a versatile remote-boot processor, that can be downloaded for free from the Web. It can perform a large variety of actions on a computer at boot-time, before any operating system operation has started. Actions performed by BpBatch ranges from partitioning hard disk to authenticating users, including a graphical interface. The main feature of BpBatch is the partition cloning facility, which let you create an image of a computer's hard disk partition and then distribute and install this image on a cluster of PC.
If you are looking for a computer lab that CS studnts can use, go with standard X-Windows dumb-terminals. They have nice big screens and nothing small enough or useful enough that anybody would want to steal.
If you are thinking you want a lab for writing/printing papers and surfing the internet, then go CHEAP. A PII 400 can run Win2k, Word and Mozilla with no problems, and they are mega cheap if you can find them.
"Your superior intellect is no match for our puny weapons!"
From my experience working in the computer lab, most of the clients who came in weren't very thin at all. Most of them were fat guys with bad haircuts.
I Heart Sorting Networks
First off, a school facing budget cuts should not be relying on Windows. That's a 'solution' which will only get more expensive over time.
:)
That being said, I would recommend Linux or one of the free BSD variants, as they have the capability to be thin clients (NFS mount filesystems). If you're interested in doing this with Linux, there's already a project set up to do just that: Linux Terminal Server Project (LTSP).
I was nearly hired by a university myself, and had suggested they look into this, as it also makes life easier when trying to administrate such a large number of systems. Alas, the university rejected both the suggestion, and my bid for employment - but that's another story.
Good luck.
One thing to keep in mind is the upkeep cost of the setup over it's lifetime. A 3-5 year period of operation is an eternity in computing. Going to a thin client setup means to be able to stay paced with advancements in software is going to require extensive, and VERY expensive upgrades server side. In practice I've noticed that every 2 years the RAM required to run a standard PC doubles. Initiallly you're going to require somewhere in the range of 64megs server side per thin client on the table. Assume 100 clients, thats 6.4gigz of ram initially. 2 years down the line you're talking 12.8gigz of ram. Something else to consider is bandwidth. Does your intranet have the pipe to handle that many open sessions without bogging down? This is the problem that killed the company I work for and our attempt at switching to thin clients. We ran a very small setup (10 boxes) on a switched 100base network. Having each client up and running at any given time used around 40-60% of our available pipe. In retrospect while the idea of the thin client is perfect for a schools use (software control for all clients at a central location and whatnot) the overhead needed to keep it active was really not worth our effort, we returned all 10 as well as the server back to who we got it from after only a month.
Thinknic.com. Go there. Basically for $200 you get a full working thin computer that can then be tied into the existing infrastructure. You could even give each user a disk that they use to boot up (ejecting the disk could shut down the system).
There are a lot of possibilities.
I'd recommend looking at what the City of Largo, Florida has done. Mid-summer last year they went live with a pretty big (+400) Linux/thin-client based system.
It's been detailed by all the Linux rags (including Slashdot). Last I heard Citrix and Microsoft paid them a (friendly) visit, but they're still running Linux.
The environment has been rock solid stable (by Windows standards, not Unix). They can get by with two (two!) NT servers, versus 200+ desktops. Most helpdesk calls are actually solved by cycling the client.
End result: a big savings in labor costs.
Madness takes its toll. Exact change please.
Microsoft practically gives away software to educational institutions. W2K Terminal Services are a solid solution.
Dangerous Masturbatory Habits
Men and women will go to great lengths to give themselves sexual satisfaction. Sometimes the results are not what was hoped for. One book mentions the case of a man who tried to masturbate by putting his penis into the sucking end of a vacuum-cleaner. The result was that all the skin was sucked off the penis. This method of masturbation "is not therefore recommended." P. Mantegazza has instanced the case of a penis caught in a bayonet tube and in the bath tub faucet. Many similar such cases are known to doctors and diligent researchers.
LOL!
--Metrollica
The trick is to balance cost of hardware/software of server/client with the flexibility of upgrading hardware/software on the server end, yet keep performance high, and security in mind.
So, If i was doing this, this is how i would approach it:
1. you have to keep the cost of the thin clients under $250... thats without monitor. These need to be small, dependable, and easlily replaced. In other words, you should be able to walk into someones office, and unplug it, and plug in a new one, and they should be ready to go in under a min. if you have to do lots of configuration on the client side to get things working, then get a better thin client from another vendor. Make sure the thin client comes with something like a san disk or something you can overwrite. What you want to be able to do is run a *nix on it that can do remote X connections, or do rdp connections. forget about getting in bed with citrix, its way too much money, and you really dont get that much back. unless you use all the whiz bang features, and have lots of time to learn how to tie it all together.
2. Use a combination of windows terminal servers and *nix terminal servers. By default you want people to use the *nix servers, but their will be some folks who want or need to use windows apps, and letting them be able to do so, is a good thing. You can use rdesktop to let the thin client connect to the windows terminal server. it is a little slower than the native windows rdp client, or the citrix ica client, however its free, and it runs on *nixes. If you had to use the windows rdp client it would cost you a windows ce license at least, and to get the citrix client you would have to spring for the whole citrix package which gets expensive.
3. Get solid dual proc servers with as much ram as they can hold! dont skimp! get fast scsi drives, and try to squeeze it into a small footprint. If you can use the same hardware for both the *nix and windows terminal servers, that will be a plus, since you can shuffle them around incase of failure, or more demand for one kind than another.
4. cookie cut the systems. in other words, have it designed that you can get another server up and configured in under an hour. this way, incase you need to scale quickly, or have massive hardware failure, you have a system that can be brought back online asap.
5. stress test the hell out of your design before you go into production. nothing will be worse than realising down the road that you have a design flaw, and you have to scrap and rebuild stuff. that will piss the users off, your boss off, and probably get you fired. tune for performance, and plan to scale. it doesnt matter if you only have 500 users right now, if your design isnt good enough to scale up to 5000, or even 50000, go back to the drawing board and see where your bottleneck is. Why? cause that bottleneck may come back to bite you one day.
You want to start down the right path with
FreeBSD. *linux is redundant and dying anyways.
So since you have all these new machines to
reinstall, start off right and don't get sucked
down the *linux quagmire.
I am a hardware tech at a school district in central california. Our network consists of around 1200 computers, around 22 servers, and 200 printers or so. Our network is pretty much all Macintosh running OS 9.2.z. It works great for us, especially given that the Macs we bought have a fairly long longevity. Most machines perform all the necessary functions for at least 5 years, and then they keep running until they are replaced by something younger.
We have been experimenting with NetBoot, and it works wonders, except for the network bottleneck. Apple has always been extremely helpful in what we have needed to do.
Whatever may be said about Apple, they have always been a great company and product for us.
The problem is...at least at my school, that thin clients an Sun boxes are wanted a lot more by students than windows boxes nowadays. But fortunately our cam-budget has not been cut (although the refreshrate of the (web)cams is low enough to run in and grab a boxes between 2 images being taken:P).
0x or or snor perron?!
Either way if you go with W2K you will soon discover that it is a maintenance nightmare compared to *NIX (basically, multi-user support was kludged onto the NT kernel, as opposed to being designed to be there in the first place).
If you do not have to use Windows then you could consider Sun Rays.
If you have a small number of people who would need Windows access then you could setup a Citrix MetaFrame server and have those users run the Solaris ICA client.
We have two Sun Ray servers here with about 60-70 Sun Rays between the two right now. We're also running a Citrix MetaFrame for UNIX server (for the curious on Slashdot, for after hours dial-up support). The only real problem we have is with graphics intensive applications. Lots and lots of display deltas do not mix with any thin client technology.
-- Argel
At Reading University, where I attend, there are several big labs running Windows. Used to be Win95, now Win2K. Anyway, the apps for the machines are on a central server(s) somewhere, as are user's home directories, email, etc. The machines are automatically kept in synch with a master copy of Windows somewhere.
I think that the server is *NIX, and the apps, etc. are brought over a Samba share to drive-letter N-O, or something. The drive is kept synched (or, it used to be under Win95, not sure now...) with PC-RDist.
Hope this helps, as the labs are quite speedy, and although you can change a lot of setings, etc, when the computer is rebooted, everything is reset.
Good luck,
lyceus./
I won't lie we had some problem at the begening, but overall the TCO is definitly lower then PC.
Those are preaty cool and are even easyier then citrix. The software cost is 0$, this is a huge saving (you have to be willing to quit office for star office). If you really need some windows app you can put citrix behind the sunrar servers and acces them on the sunrays.
Maybe not the solution for everyone but you definitly should look at it.
Go with Win2k and MS Terminal Services. It's much faster than Citrix and, in my opinion, less complicated.
Since it's for educational purposes, you'll get a great price and you'll probably get the Windows source code if you ask for it.
How about this:
You have a linux terminal server for all of the workstations. This can be done very cheaply as you can reuse all of your existing computers as thin clients. You then buy 2 servers. One for the linux terminal services and apps, and the 2nd a Win2K or NT4 terminal server (You can find used ones copies on ebay that are not too expensive).
You then setup the workstations to run from the linux terminal server and have the program rdesktop run from within linux (this allows you to run the rdp protocol and connect to the windows terminal server.)
Benefits:
Linux security, especially when using web browsing/email, plus the added benefit that students can take part in any problem solving and writing of new programs for the university. Also, there is very little to any costs involved
Access to windows programs for those who need it, this allows for backward compatibility for some of those older programs that people still use
notes: rdesktop seems to be much more stable and preferable to the citrix client in Linux. The main advantages of citrix (faster modem speeds, sound, client mapping) do not apply here. Any client mappings can be handled through samba for the local machine. I actually think that rdesktop is faster than citrix client although the Windows term server is limited to 256 colors I think.
Weaknesses:
graphics/games. Terminal services are too slow for true graphics work. Mostly this is a bandwidth issue. It can be done, it just is a lot slower, esp if you have the raw data on a seperate server so that you are pulling the info twice (1st to the terminal server and 2nd to the terminal client, 3 times if trying to do it through citrix)
My wife was a regional sales rep for Citrix for several years. Citrix is good stuff with real benefits as described previously *if* your apps are not graphics/cpu intensive (i.e. MS
Word/Excel good; GIS mapping bad).
Also, Citrix themselves will not install/setup the installation; all of that is handled by the reseller. It is the quality of the reseller that almost completely determines the quality of the installation. Most good resellers will setup for you a 30-day demo with the apps you specify to give you the opportunity to evaluate whether or not your particular apps/usage is a good fit. Furthermore most good resellers are also proficient in both Citrix, RDP and other thin client setups.
My advice is to first do your background research on the reseller, remember there are many successfull thin-client deployement, but your particular reseller may not have done any! If your reseller is not open, talk to the Citrix rep-they should point your to one of there "platinum" level resellers.
Further- do not try to do the thin-client setup yourself whatever implementation you decide (citrix, rdp, linux, blah). Hire someone with experience.
Some clarifications:
* Citrix was founded by a group of very pro-unix folks. Their first software package was WinFrame which was actually a hacked version of WinNT 3.x. that added simulateous multi-user capabilities and the ICA protocol for remote sessions.
* Microsoft bought the multi-user extensions from Citrix and incorporated them into Win2K. This left Citrix with just the need for a simpler application to maintain which managed remote sessions over ICA- this is Metaframe and runs on top of Win2K Server.
* RDP is a lame ICA-workalike. RDP is not ICA. ICA does not run on RDP.
Also in the interest of full disclosure:
- My wife has been employed by both Microsoft and Citrix.
- My company (and myself) use citrix on a regular basis, in addition to Win2K.
- I develop software on Win2k and Solaris
- I believe everyone should be running MacOS X.
It's possible to have what's called "AppStations" where users don't see anything but a list of programs on the desktop. You can even get rid of the task bar, and have an FWM type window presented to them. You can even lock down a desktop so that the only thing on the desktop is a browser.
O'Reilly has a book on it, but Microsoft has freely downloadable documentation as well as the kit which have nice screenshots of how a windows machine can look when you use ZAK to its fullest extent.
The interface they use is simplistic, but I'd think you could use others
Computer Science is Applied Philosophy
Linux on the desktop. This will enable you to have remote X sessions. Also add rdesktop for remote Windows sessions via Win2k Terminal Services. And if you really need it, use Citrix client.
ie. best solution/platform is Linux
---- Put Sig here:
Citrix is extremely expensive. Our solution ran some $20k - on the cheap even. Add to that the cost of Terminal Server Client Access Licenses, Windows Client Access Licenses, Citrix Client Access Licenses, and a license for every app (per user) you're going to run off the server. Oh, and Office has extra licensing requirements as well. And don't forget training.
On the plus side, Citrix is a breeze to use and manage. The 2000 release is rock-solid stable, though I haven't evaluated XP yet. The huge price tag really turns me off. Make damned sure you lock your box down tighter than a choirboy's ass - check out this ArsTechnica article for a good place to start. Keep up at BugTraq and other security spots for exploits.
I bought 10 old 233MMX Pentium workstations loaded with RAM for a song that I'm using to add/replace workstations. However, from a pricing standpoint there are (so far) few advantages to running Windows-free on the client side if you have to use a lot of Microsoft applications. This is by design.
I've evaluated StarOffice, but it's just not going to cut the mustard for document compatibility (reading *and* writing). However, I'm very happy with Corel Office and plan to migrate to that company-wide.
Back at school, they used Novel for thin client apps in the engineering NT lab. It worked ok but had some annoying startup times. lots of grey bars filling up with blue boxes.
At work now, Novel is a piece of crap. We use Citrix for some things and it works nicely. I've heard that it has memory leaks and will crash you if you don't have a lot of RAM. I haven't personaly seen this but I work with an old-timer that holds a grudge against Citrix for this very reason. Like i said, I haven't seen it personaly but I haven't seen our Citrix server pushed to any sort of limits. If you're talking about 500 machines, I don't know how that will scale. I'm willing to bet that you'll need more than one Metaframe server.
Blaze a trail to the New World
We have several hundred PCs in students labs and have had almost no theft. We get our security hardware from www.flexguard.com.
Checkout www.falconstor.com
They have a Linux/Solaris based storage virtualization product that would enable you to build fat but diskless clients. For Windows and Linux/Unix clients use a Fibre Channel or iSCSI card in the clients, and boot off a remote disk as if it were a locally attached SCSI drive. Linux/Unix clients can also be booted the old fashioned way (netboot, etherboot, etc) but why go through the trouble?
You get all the benefits of having local disks in the clients plus centralized backup and management like you get with thin clients. Example: Some user blew away his whole drive while playing with fdisk? At the central server just restore a recent backup, or copy over a standard disk image, and tell the user to reboot.
I've been using it for a while now and one cool feature is the ability to virtually swap boot "disks" for my machines where I used to physically swap boot disks mounted in removable carriers. I am also using it to share a single tape drive among 5 servers, using their SCSI over Ethernet implementation. It's almost like NAT sharing for SCSI devices.
I donno if anyone remebers the city in florida that did thin clients. Seams to work for them. And the school can keep all the older computers. Administration should be easy. Everytime the computer reboots it is set back to the site default.
First I'll assume you're in a windows / intel environment and it's beyond your power to change that. So be it. Where I work we did a little testing and benchmarking and talked to a citrix / windows-ts sysadmin or two. The general rule of thumb we came up with is: 1 high-end processor + 1 gig of RAM = 10 happy users. Please note: that's CORPORATE users... running resource hogs like outlook and having 15+ windows open all the time. Also, like another comment stated... ferret out ALL your costs when you do your analysis. Also, I did some college lab management a while back and noticed that all money is not created equal... money for equipment may be easier to get than money for staff, depending on the financial and political environment at your institution. Don't forget, this thin client stuff is a bandwidth hog. No problem for a well-designed switched lan, if you have that. Figure 30 to 100 KB/s AVERAGE per user for average office apps. MUCH more for multimedia. Citrix will tell you as little as 7KB/s. Don't believe them.
It's called X-11, and there are also X servers and WMs for windows (at least I have documentation that says there are WMs for Windows).
We've been running thin and ultrathin client for both scientists, administrators and computer labs for a few years now. Though bumpy at times, it's been a great ride.
The thin clients are computers that are both rugged, relatively tamper- and theft-proff as well as inexpensive: iMacs. Starting early 1999, we've netbooted a little over a hundred of them using a few G3 servers, each with five 100Mbit interfaces serving an equal number of (relatively) small subnets. Additionally to netbooting, they also managed the personalization of the user environment, restoring user preferences upon login, and storing them upon logout. User files live on fileservers, that are mounted automatically upon login. Finally, transparently available (Unix) compute servers and - for the rare cases in which there's no other way - application hosting for legacy Windos applications using HOBlink, Citrix, rdesktop, VNC (or whatever) is available.
There's zero software-maintenance per desktop. Zero. Additionally, reliability is high and reproducability is absolute: there can be no difference between desktops, period. So system administration can focus on important things instead of wasting time on per-desktop troubleshooting, restoration, maintenance procedures and so on. Software installation is centralized, and a rigourous quality testing strategy can be enforced.
For those traditionally stuck in X11, it's provided by ultrathin Sun Ray clients. Absolutely silent, zero maintenance, excellent performance and absolute reliability. Of course, you need to devote Quality Time[tm] to create a Unix environment that's complete, and of recognizable higher quality than users get by performing well-meant tinkering on a local file system. If you do, that maintenance nightmare is gone too
It pays. With very little manpower, you can not only keep things running smoothly: all time is spent on improving and staying abreast of developments.
Boxes are cheap. Maintenance is expensive. Troubleshooting is expensive. Lack of a consistent quality is expensive. The time users waste trying create a working, fully functional environment for themselves and maintaining it is an expensive loss. Invest a little, gain a lot!
That being said, anyone's free to silently (and not very visibly) spend huge amounts of resources on per-desktop maintenance, whether by admins or by users themselves. I know I wouldn't, ever again.
Consider using VNC. I believe it's free (as in beer). From their website:
windows 2000 server supports terminal services. It's really easy to set up,
and it's free. there is no need for citrix that I can think of, except to
support non_MS clients. - but everyone HAS MS clients (OK slashdotters
think it's evil - but everyone else already has it). Windows 2000 Pro has
its own licenses (no extra cost), and I think academic licenses for 9x and
3.11 are real cheap. I know everyone on Slashdot thinks you should rip
everything out and go Linux - but it just aint a-gonna happen. What do 95%
of everyone already run ? WIndows. it's what they know, and just try and
make your admin types (NOT sysadmins) change.
Based on my knowledge of MS licensing for schools, this is probably the
cheapest way to go. Email me if you have questions
ghare@bellsouth.net
Greg Hare
MCSE, MCT
Florida schools. 49th out of 50. Thanks JEB!
rdpdesktop.org doesn't work but www.rdesktop.org does.
Am i the only one here that went to school and had a bunch of dumb xterminal machines to work on, all slaved off a few servers in the back room?
Pretty close to the definition of a thin client, if im not mistaken. An old technology to be sure, but it works, is proven, and doesnt cost that much.
Every thing old is new again. Go from thin client to desktop back to thin clients agian.
Citrix is expensive, you need Citrix server licences, Citrix Connection Licences, Win2k server licences, Win2k CALs and Win2k Terminal Services CALs. Not cheap, I firgure I've spent about $600 CD per user on these alone. In the end this will save you money on admin time and headaches. The upfront costs are scary but the TCO is lower.
Thin clients are cool. I use NCD ThinStars and I'm pretty happy with them. They run WinCE, have all the client software built in for Citrix and MS RDP, they remind me so much of the HP X term I used way back when I can't belive it sometimes. Keep in mind you won't have any removable media though.
The thing you have to do before even considering this is audit your software requirements. If you want to setup general use labs with Office and IE, you'll be fine. For a CS lab or an Eng lab where you have stuff like compilers and Matlab installed it just isn't gonna work.
Don't go cheap on the servers, when they go down you are hooped. Of the current bunch out there I like the Compaqs the best, figure on dual proc P3s (Xeons are overkill for this) with 1 to 2 GB RAM and RAID 1 or 5. The boost you get from having a RAID adapter with a big cache is huge when compared to a SCSI system. This server will handle out 25 or 30 people depending on thier usage.
If your software requirements are compatable with the concept I think you should really take a look at it. TCO is much lower, if Office breaks you have to fix it on a few servers, IE uber patches installed a few times, much easier than 100 desktops, belive me. I have two friends that started out with me in the same company 8 years ago and now we are all Citrix admins in different places. All of us have the same opinion, if you have to run a Windows network, this is the way to do it. One of them is the admin for a Citrix reference client.
The only warning I have for you is to be damn careful about the software you deploy. When you have a shared sytem anything can drop the whole boat for you. Be damn careful of HP printer drivers some of the LaserJet drivers will crash you, all of the Deskjet drivers will cause you problems.
Check out these sites for info:
www.thethin.net
www.thinplanet.com
And read these books:
Windows NT/2000 Thin Client Solutions
Citrix: MetaFrame for Windows Terminal Services: The Official Guide
If you have any other questions feel free to email me : electric-monk(at)cadvision.com
We are doing this right now at the University I work at. We are using Windows Terminal Services for W2K. You can use Rdesktop (rdesktop.org) to connect from a linux box, or the client is free from MS. For Terminals, the best bang:buck ratio we found was from Wyse. Apparently the XP version of Terminal Services even allows local drive mapping. Even works decent for allowing offsite access to your lab software over a 56k or better connection.
I went to the University of Waterloo, where they have successful labs full of thin clients.
And they've had them for ten years.
A lab full of X terminals is a lot easier to run than a lab full of individual workstations. Citrix is just a reimplementation of X, only done badly because the infrastructure just isn't there in Windows.
Granted....
But then again, you need one server for every 5-6 Citrix clients if you're doing anything intensive... like running Word.
I don't have a solution, but I certainly admire the problem.
Citrix and the underlying Window NT or 2000 need to be properly secured to prevent this sort of thing. The only way that a remote user can shut down the server it to have both local admin privs and access to the shutdown option.
e x. htm
A properly configured Citrix server should only publish the applications that are needed by the clients. As you can publish just an application, there is no excuse for someone being able to shut down the server.
Last but not least, you can set session timeouts to prevent people from leaving idle sessions that tie up user connections.
I personally work for a company that has hundreds of citrix servers (yes, servers, not clients... the clients are upwards of 3000 internal plus many customers) and while there need to be many special considerations made when sharing computing power in this fashion, it is actually a very cost effective and easy to manage.
http://www.wyse.com/products/winterm/3200le/ind
This is the product that we are currently looking to replace several hundred desktops with. It boots in roughly the amount of time that it takes for the CRT tube to warm up and is pretty well idiot proof.
I know that this is off topic, but it is important.
Why are we getting education cuts? What did we hear from the politicians the last election year? MORE MONEY FOR EDUCATION!!!! So, where is it?
The politicians must have forgotten about the people that voted for them. I know that there has been a recession. So what? It only lasts a year or so.
In the future, they will probably give more money, but that will only get us back to where we were before the recession. As a college instructor I can't help but feel betrayed.
I'm not talking about pay raises either. I'm talking about money for programs, buildings, technology...
I hope people wake up soon and realize that our schools are being robbed blind of money they desperately need.
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
Try the Linux terminal server project or the K-12 LTSP. We have found them to be very effective and relatively simple. There is good support and it doesn't cost anything more than the hardware we already had.
James
Avrice
The first thing you should be considering is what types of applications people are going to need to be running in the labs.
Is there is a requirement that you need to run Windows applications in this lab? Then you really only have one choice: PCs. Mickeysoft does not have a good thin client solution, no matter what they say.
Is the lab is going to be used by "regular" (read: non CS/Engineering) students? The argument again here is strongly for PCs, because the vast majority of users are most familiar with some brand of Windows. Thin clients can be substituted here, but there is a hidden cost: the time required to train people how to use the system goes up considerably. This is due to many more people needing "extra" help to understand how to use the system. These people often need this extra help over and over again because they don't have to use the lab machines that often. That in turn means you have to hire more people to sit around in the labs to help people, and these people are more expensive over time than the computers are.
Now, if the system is going to be used primarly by "techie" type students, such as CS and Engineering, then the actual cost of the system becomes the most important factor. These people already know a thing or two about computers, and those who don't will learn quickly because they'll have constant contact with the lab machines. They'll quickly transition out of the extra help stage and you would only need to hire more help guys for a brief period of time, if you need them at all. These types of students are generally better at solving computer problems, and they're usually pretty good about helping others in an environment where most people have at least half a clue. (They won't always offer help in regular labs due to the high volume of clueless people who are a pain in the ass to give help to, and the "cling" factor: help me, now help me, now me!)
And don't skimp on security. At least have a security wire to keep the machines from walking off. Even dummy terminals usually have monitors that are worth stealing if yours is a piece of crap, or broken. And yeah, I was a sys admin for a university a few years back. I won't go back I tell you! Away, helpless users! Get your tentacles off me!
// harborpirate
// Slashbots off the starboard bow!
take a look at ClearCube - www.clearcube.com
Everyone gets their own PC and they can be centrally managed, but it's thin on the desktop.
If you have a fast-enough network :-) it works.
In a previous job, I implemented Citrix Winframe (the old NT 3.51 flavor) to server nursing stations over LAN and WAN. We deployed well over 100 of the stations using two dual PPro systems (I said it was old).
While I was a bit insulated from the cost, the time spent troubleshooting issues was cut dramatically. At the same time, nary a complaint about speed was voiced. At all the stations, various MS office applications were used on a regular basis, as was Web browsing, and several nasty old DOS applications (getting those to work was a headache and a hack). Without it, immense amounts of time would have been wasted configuring costly PCs and dealing with individual issues on each machine. The ability to shadow a session and work with the user over the phone is priceless!
More recently using Win2k Terminal Services, I was happy how well the server scaled, even with users running large PLSQL jobs, manipulating large access databases etc. Most (if not all) of the problems associated with individual workstations were eliminated in a thin client environment.
I've looked over the Linux Term services, and while I really like the idea, for our users it isn't really an option yet. Even though the learning curve is small, it is enough right now that I wouldn't have the time to train everyone on the particulars of the MS equivalent linux apps.
If you are planning on a thin client environment, citrix or the MS equivalent is the way to go.
This one relates the story of a government's thin client deployment in the state of florida:
I happen to be an administrator of a SunRay network, and can offer the following advice: if you decide to go with thin clients, don't cut any corners on your networking hardware. Get gigE, and quality switches. You want as much bandwidth as possible going into your server. A couple of users streaming video will cause everyone's thin-client workstation to slow down considerably, unless your pipes are wide enough to handle it.
Cheers
I used to run a lab with 30 computers this way. It was actually very easy because of the way the OS worked. There were two important things that made the whole thing work: NetInfo, and being able to do an NFS mount without having to do a mkdir first.
However, if you are talking about think clients to a Linux or UNIX server, that makes a lot of sense. You pay nothing extra on either the client or the server, it's trivial to set up and administer, and it works really well.
If you really want client access to Windows, at least consider getting the NIC; for $200, you get a devices that does Citrix ICA, X11, ssh, VNC, web browsing, and telnet out of the box. The reviews claim that they are easy to set up and upgrade (just pop in a new CD), and with that, you only need to worry about the server side for Windows.
Really? That's pathetic. Surely you didn't
expect to reveal this to slashdot and NOT be told
to switch to linux!
Consider: 20 students, 1 server. The instructor says: All right, let's all open Autocad (or some other heavyweight app with big datasets) now.
Depending how the lab is used this may not be an issue. Teacher awareness can mitigate the problem somewhat.
On a p2-3xx with 64mb ram and win95, the interface is visibly slow.
This has to be a result of server load or network bandwith. I have the ICA client running on a P166 with 100Mb switch ethernet and I can't tell the difference between it and the console.
the server is supposed to map your printers, but we find that PCs with more than one available printer either won't print, or print to random destinations.
Printer mapping is a nightmare. I am frankly more surprised that it works at all than that it works poorly. I'm transitioning all my printers to sahred printer with netork connections rather than client connected ones. Setup like that it works great.
You won't save a lot of $ on hardware and no $ on licences but the TCO is lower. A citrix farm is cheaper to admin than 200 desktops, no question.
--
Given enough personal experience, all stereotypes are shallow.
Going to a high-school that has implemented a thin-client solution (with Citrix), I believe that the implementaion is a grossly flawed. Being a user myself, my peers regularly complain about the speed and reliability (loose network cables are bad) of the dumb terminals. It would be much more cost effecive, efficient, and less of a strain on the network to add computers. Being closely related with the IT staff, I know that the company from which we get the thin-client service from suffers from downtimes and slow service as well as lax security.
I'm assuming you need to run at least some legacy Windows applications. A cheap way to do what Citrix offers is to use a central Linux file server with accounts set up for each end user on the central server. Each workstation (PC) then boots off the central server (this could be a diskless boot, or you could have the minimal kernel software on a harddrive on the workstation and everything else on the central server. Using Win4Lin gives the Linux client/server access to the legacy Windows applications.
u id e/staff.shtml
Win4Lin http://www.win4Lin.com/ is a $79.00 Linux application that allows a Window session to be run in a Linux process. The code runs on the native hardware in a protected ring. It is not an emulated x86 like the plex86 architecture. The application runs in an X Window under Linux. (One mode of operation takes over a root X Window. In this mode it looks like Windows is running natively. You can still swap between Linux virtual councils.
Win4Lin is faster than VMWare, but it only runs Win95 or Win98. This is good enough for running MSWord and other low bandwidth graphical apps.
The nice thing about this approach is that you can recycle the Win98 and Win95 licenses you are using for the systems on which the application will be running and the end user will have the choice between using the Win4Lin/MSWord application or the Linux/OpenOffice application.
In other words, this makes for a smooth transition path to a non-MS based lab environment. No need to run dangerous MS mail tools, the Kmail tool, or your other favorite mail tool will be much safer. Just give them access to the legacy apps.
In this scenario the client-server work is hidden from the end user by using by using the standard Unix approach of using NFS to mount user accounts to whichever PC the student sits in front of. The system software is also served from a centralized NFS server so only one system needs to be be upgraded to upgrade all the client systems.
I proposed this architecture to my organization. My calculations on simply upgrading motherboards and recycling 1000 computers came out to a $1M savings over the proposed replacement of the 1000 systems with brand new Windows 2000 based systems. (This was during FY00.)
Simon Wilkinson at Trinity college [1] has done some interesting work in the area of making it very easy to restore systems in a computer science lab. I don't recall the details. I think they replaced the system disks with compact flash cards and simply replaced the cards at the end of eash day.
[1]http://www.trinity.unimelb.edu.au/fsp/acad_g
I've been working with Citrix almost non-stop for the last two years and we've done some recent implementations (up to 1000 users) in the education sector.
/concurrent/ connection for Citrix. Meaning, if you're going to have 500 users in your Citrix environment, but only 40 connected at any given time, you only need to purchase 40 Citrix Connection Licenses.
First, Citrix is a great product, but the costs don't justify unless you're using it fully. Citrix's new server product called MetaFrame XP comes in three different flavors: XPs, for a single server implementation, XPa, for a load balanced environment, and XPe, the load balanced environment with all the bells and whistles.
Costs that are required are as such:
1. You're going to have to have Windows 2000 Client Access Licenses for everyone that will hit the Windows 2000 server[s] running Terminal Services.
2. You're going to have to have Windows 2000 Terminal Server Client Access Licneses for every box that will hit the Windows 2000 server[s] running Terminal Services. Keep in mind, though, that a Windows 2000 Professional PC comes with a TS CAL. So, no need to purchase a TS CAL for any Windows 2000 Professional PC that will connect.
3. You're going to have to buy Connection Licenses for each
4. If you purchase your Citrix Licenses with Subscription Advantage, which allows you free Feature Release upgrades, there's an additional cost per license.
Euducation environments get price breaks on their licenses, so, its not as bad as it could be.
If you're looking for a locked-down environment, with some manageability, look at Windows 2000 with Terminal Services instead of adding Citrix. With Windows 2000 Group Policy's you can lock down virtual desktop sessions really well and provide that secure, load balanced thin-client solution. You can find some thin-client linux based devices for under $300. Check out the following for a nice device with RDP built in: http://www.neoware.com/products/capio/5xx.html
Power consumption is another factor not looked at by many. Gartner did a study that found, on average, thin clients to consume up to 7x less power per PC. This comes at quite a savings if you factor in all the PCs in your environment during the year.
One last thing to help you figure out cost savings. Citrix has a tool you can use to get some rough numbers to view projected savings. Check out the following link to the ACE Cost Analyzer: http://acecostanalyzer.com/
Citrix products are used in 99% of the Fortune 100 and 90% of the Fortune 500. The product works, and works well, when someone knowledgeable can help out with the solution. Im not saying that the product is perfect, but many problems (such as printing, etc) can be avoided or minimized with help.
Good luck,
pini0n
Clearly, the idea of being able to add an extra few years to the lives of our lab PCs is very attractive...
Just buy a really nice computer right before the SSSCA is signed into law. It will be state of the art technology for the next fifty years!
You can reduce system theif by using single entry rooms and student asstiant manned labs. If you ask what about 24/7 labs, then you should look no further than a simple alarm system coupled with those little light sensor cables. A person sould have to try very hard to open a proper case enclosed with those cables, much less steal it before the alarms go off...
;)
also place 24/7 labs at floors higher than ground level. Oh, the little basterds won't have a chance when coupled with hidden cameras.
this would make sense if your in a windows environment...though not free. At last, a network boot solution for Windows XP, 2K and NT. With BootNIC you can eliminate all storage on your embedded equipment. Reduce costs, increase reliability, improve system management and enhance your system security. http://www.venturcom.com/products/network_centric/ bnic.asp
Watch out for this one. I work for a large pharmecuetical company that was sold on the metaframe model.
To say that it hasn't delivered as promised is a gross understatement.
1) the cost of the software alone can break you.
2) depending on the software you are running, performance can be unbearably slow.
3) whatever recommendations they are giving you for server sizing, multiply it *4 at a minimum.
For *public* labs at a university, Linux is simply not your answer. If the environment was *entirely* CS and CE majors, it would do fine (all our CS labs are almost exclusively Debian); however, for your typical English major running in to type up a paper 5 minutes before class - he/she will want Word, not Star/Open Office or KOffice, etc. You can deny it till your face turns blue, but it's the truth.
Is that we have nothing but problems with Citrix thin clients, so much so that noone uses them anymore. We do however have 100+ X terminals running GNOME with no problems whatsoever... Except that the buggers are getting a bit old. (NCD HMXs and HMXpro24s) Therefore we're in the process of upgrading all the clients to $700 Dells running Redhat 7.2 with a couple of central servers serving out the applications over an NFS /usr/local. So we get the benefit of having CPU cycles on each machine, but also the centralized application storage of a client/server model. Combine that with the fact that our operating system is free, and we're left with cheap, reliable, and easily administrated labs. Oh, and we still have that one Citrix box that the users can use Office on... which they never do. ;)
-auttie
--->auttie
Back several years ago we tried to rollout an NC thin client test at a single lab to see how well it worked...
;)
it was a nightmare. The machines ran WinCenter over an NT server with a beefy spec. for that time. However, over time only 4-5 clients could stay up a full day b/c of huge swap disk and stability issues with NT. It's not worth it unless you can make your server 99.99% as others have said... also we had to retrian staff to wait on server to be fixed and to call once a day to get other staff out to reboot/purge tmp disk buffers in our case. Heh, putting servers in local closets in test rollouts help ensure bad systems stay out. No one likes walking out to a fucking NT box to kick it on the hour.
Citrix is the administrators power tool. Not the black and decker drill mind you, but the really expensive swedish pneumatic drill. /. for phone tap systems they build... name escapes me now). But, those things run on HP superdome hardware. Or at least I believe one of them does. And it -needs- that, the user experience is, ahem, leisurely. Tread carefully. I think you took an excellent first step by asking about alternatives in a nice friendly open source sorta forum here. All IMO bk425
Ever get a cellular phone activated or a phone bill? Most phone activations are done through an Israeli software package running on nationwide citrix systems (the Israeli company was mentioned on
It was a joke.
The parent is a little shy on details and there is one more post farther down which is better, but I'll add my opinions.
Assess your needs first. What kind of computer lab? What will the students be doing there? Is connectivity with MS apps/OS a requirement? What type of budget do you have for the changeover? What are your current and forecasted staffings for this lab?
There are many "LTSP" posts, and I think that's great, because I administer 45 machines set up this way at my language lab in a Thai university, but it may or may not be for you. We require some Windows programs that were pruchased before I came on, so we use a Win2000 terminal server and the rdesktop program.
It all works beautifully, but do NOT be confused by some of the posts below, because sound IS NOT supported on terminal server. The word from MS is maybe next generation (really makes you wish it was open source and you could just add it in, no?).
I researched this for about four months, and, in the end, we went with K12LTSP, which is preconfigured for LTSP using auto DHCP on RH 7.2 with all sorts of difficult to set up issues already resolved (including sound). It includes a lot of extra software like openoffice, and you can just pop in a RH7.2 disk to get the development stuff you will probably need. It is an awesome piece of work, and I heartily recommend it.
As I said, start with evaluating your needs before locking yourself into a solution that may cause you more headaches than individual machines.
Dan
Put identity in the browser.
Hi all. Felt like I had a lot to say here.
/. community could figure out a million other things they could do as well to secure.
Forgive the formatting. I'm not too sure what
y'all would prefer, so I kept it plain old text.
I also figure since it's my first posting,
I won't be replying to this one.
Just in case I anger anyone.
---my attempt at humor---
I remember spending a week or so in hell installing Citrix servers.
When one of the old teachers came by to see what
applications could be installed; she made a silly joke; she earned a "boot to the head!"
"Does it come in any other flavor?"
---the wordy part of my post---
Don't do it.
Read the support forums for Citrix.
I had to read it for a year.
Anything that requires that much tweaking should not be at this production level of demand.
Even if you're willing to bear all the hiccups, and the troubleshooting (general issues), more troubleshooting (securing/breaking applications) and even more troubleshooting (after you tweak the systems, which is a requirement for any widely distributed Citrix install), just remember..this is Windows.
How long do you think it'll be before you have to format the drive and start from scratch...all over again?
even 5 years from production level approval is a pain.
you'd have to implement a log for every single change; and any tech will tell you how much they cut into your time "after" work.
cuz even w/ a great backup strategy, nothing is guaranteed recovery.
especially if your hardware blows out,
and you can't get an exact replacement or the system admin who knew everything and didn't document suddenly is unavailable for whatever reason.
Then a reinstall is a must.
---re-run a wacky idea---
What would be cool is if you take all your old workstations and implement this:
Find someway to get the VNC viewer application
to run on them via whichever supported OS or Java.
Then the users can launch VNC viewer to connect to the remote low-end Win2KPro boxes (workstation rack?) using microatx or whatever preferred mobo you could find.
don't forget to implement ssh!
you will need one Win2KPro box and license per user workstation.
are there any license limitation by using it this way?
cuz technically it'sonly one user per workstation still.
but at least you don't have to pay again for monitors or speakers....just replacement monitors, keyboards and mice.
i'd hate to think you'd have to buy all those security attachments all over again for the newer boxes too.
Admittedly, the cost will still give people stress, but at the same time isn't it worth it?
you'll have practically no major thefts.
and VNC is freeeeeeee.....
this would be just as easy to maintain too, instead of running around campus troubleshooting a machine.
you just go to the workstation rack.
I don't know if this place makes workstation racks, but they sell chassis. Putting a workstation mobo into it might no work or a lot of work. http://www.rackmountnet.com/
Someone know how much it would cost to rack a workstation?
You'd probably need to figure out a script or custom program to execute the VNC Viewer app in such a way to prevent users from connecting to the same workstations, and let the workstations still be identifiable in such a way, to know which workstation needs to be repaired.
For example, for workstation #284, rename My Computer to "Computer 284" for the end user to ID and the tech will know which machine to pull out.
You could always make this an "in house" project so you could control everything.
Of course you'll probably still need Samba or something similar to handle intensive user disk mounting.
Also your students could access their accounts/windows via java capable web browser from anywhere.
That way they could access the VNC X servers or a few spare Window workstations set aside.
of course you'd have to implement some higher security standards there.
like probably block out certain ips' from connecting and requiring complex passwords.
I'm sure
Has anyone heard of an implementation like this?
What would be any extra logistics?
What about minimum "terminal" hardware req?
I was thinking there might be issues with the cost of added power, but older workstations and
lower end 200-300wattPSU from newer workstations
would still mean power savings.
Also on top of having to worry about continous power consumption, what about outages?
Harddrive sleeping shouldn't impact too much into
user experience.
You could turn off the older workstations
and turn them back on when you needed to.
Just make sure you've got adequate ventiliation and cooling your workstation racks.
or else one big bonfire.
Ummmm.... no... take a dualy 1GHZ and a gig of ram (which is NOT that expensive now days) and you will be able to have 30 - 50 clients running normal apps
Last Year we had an IT Conference at the IBM Conference Center in Palisades NY. Great place, thin clients in the halls and all the hotel rooms.
Trick is, the room thin clients were set up differently than those in the halls. In the room, it was all rigged into a centrally managed Cirtix server, while the halls were diskless internet clients (with possibly more RAM).
When I'd call up web pages using FLASH, like http://www.MondoMiniShows.com/ , the sucky performance of Citrix was glaringly obvious. You'd be lucky to get about one frame per second.
Sneaking out into the hallway, I could view the animations in all their smoothness and highspeed glory. Still thin, but the native performance was spectacular by contrast.
Citrix performance isn't quite as speedy as X Window throughput. The LTSP yields better results and sound.
Let me start out by saying that I am a *nix person for the most part. But when it comes to large environments and running a windows desktop this is THE way to go.
/.
I have personally designed and implemented twenty to thirty of these farms like you are talking about. I have also done XTerm farms like the city of largo, and other large ones in the telcom industry. Some of which were over 1000 seats.
But the students need secure accessible and reliable access. Citrix is one of the only ways to do it cheaply and easily (relatively speaking). One of the biggest advantages is in the upgrading from one application to a newer or upgrading OS's. Correctly done this can be extremely low cost on labor. We just wrapped a two week project where we migrated all of the servers from WindowsNT4 TSE running Office 2k, and some proprietary applications to Windows 2k, Office XP and all of the new proprietary applications. This was done for 5000 desktops in two weeks, if you want the exact details just email me and let me know. Also our uptime over the last two years has been 100% in a 24/7 environment, never having been down totally once, not even for a minute. We are also using unix SAN arrays now. This is in a hospital, and works wonders. If you would like some more information just email me and I will give it to you, this is getting a little long winded on
Cheers
While still in beta, Jaunt is far more stable then Citrix. At the test site that I am at, we have had over 500 concurrent connections at one time with no slow down, with the same hardware as our Citrix server. Contact them. The price is also far lower then Citrix. http://www.nteras.com
We're using WTS, and for what we do, it works great, but we're not supporting nearly as many clients as you are. WTS is essentially Citrix, lacking some features Citrix has.
If you're going to go that direction, you're going to need a number of servers with LOTS of memory. As someone else mentioned, it can be dead-slow. You really need powerful servers. I would imagine a P3-1GHZ with 1-2GB RAM, for every 15-20 concurrent users, minimum. Even then, you're going to see fairly mediocre performance.
As for administration, frankly, you'd probably be as well off with thick clients. The administration of WTS or Citrix can be about as difficult per client.
He has a whole series of really great case studies here.
Key to financial independence: Spend less than you earn. Save and invest the difference. Do it for a long time.
Vendor salespeople are paid to convince the Big IT Boss to commit to huge implementations as the first purchase. Screw that. Set up a single lab, buy a dozen client licenses and a single server, and see how it goes. Make NO committment to go any further.
Maybe try a couple of different options (the Unix based thin client approach, the Citrix or MS Terminal Server approach, the Ghost/Imagecast reinstalled PC approach) at once in different labs. Then you'll have *actual experience* with *the vendor's actual shipping product* that you can base your decision on.
Also, definitely ask for several client references from each vendor. Compare notes with other folks who have implemented the solution in question - maybe they figured out a workaround that the vendor doesn't know about, that would work for you.
We recently deployed a massive database and property managment system with the client running through Citrix. There are 400-600 users I'm guessing accessing our cluster of 5 or so Citrix servers (Compaq Quad P3 900's 3-4 gigs ram), and they don't perform too bad.
We've sarted putting MS Office, random Oracle applications, our admin tools, & random bastard applications on the servers and they've held up. pretty good for the most part.
Access over ethernet isnt as good as local applications of course, but very useable, modem access is usually ok, but painfull on occasion. The client will run reasonably on a P133, but for the most part we have normal desktops, and Citrix is only used for the supply system or other apps.
We are really only using Metaframe, which displays the application window locally (app looks local, but is actually running on the server), but can gain desktop access if you know the tricks (just some obscure hotkeys to get taskmanager then run explorer), or if we setup users with a desktop session.
We've run into LOTS of problems with printing, as you need to install print drivers for every printer on your network to the Citrix servers. They have a tendancy to blow up the servers as there are many bad drivers out there. Hopefully we will be getting Thin Print up and running soon so we can support more than the basic printers that NT supports.
The servers themselves are a little finiky, but nothing terriably unusual for a MS product. The great advantage of a properly installed and load ballanced Citrix farm though, is when 1 machine blows up there are 4 remaining, and the users at worst just have to log back in, or may never even know the difference.
Sure, you *can* get 25-30 people per dual-CPU server. But if you have any apps that use any CPU at all, costs start to go up fast because you get a lot less bang per buck CPU-wise out of the kind of reliable servers you need to delivey the availability a Citrix / thin approach requires on the server side.
Keep in mind that modern versions of Office fall into that "apps that use CPU" category. With the numbers you have, you should be able to get a VAR to cough up some eval equipement- run a beta test before you buy to get some real-life experience with what your users need to run.
Howdy,
I admin for a company that does management for Medical Offices. We have several offices that run windows 2000 server with Terminal Services loaded. I have been very very happy with these sites.
We also have several sites that are running in a pure Windows 2000 network environment. (All Win2K CLient workstations, and servers.. nothing else) Either option is pretty close to the same cost. We use ternimal services in offices that have a lot of semi-decent hardware onsite or are planning on purchasing new computers. If a site has a bunch of skanky hardware sitting around then Terminal Server is the way to go.
Rememeber to audit your software before you consider this. EVERY SINGLE APPLICATION you want to use has to work under Terminal Services to get this to work. I built a server and test drove all my apps before I bid out the server. Lots and lots or RAM is a MUST to do Terminal Services, and I have two processors and RAID 5 in all my servers (Compaq Proliants).
The other great thing about Terminal Services is remote Administration. You get a free terminal access license with every Windows2000 server license for administrative purposes. I have a WAN link to all my servers and I can do 90% of my admin tasks from my office.... no more onsite.
I doubt a thin client option will be any cheaper unless you have a ton of skanky boxen with about 128MB of RAM and decent video cards, but TCO is borderline.
Stay away from Citrix unless you need its expanded capabilites (X-tra clients, some better mapping (serial ports and such), and some better file system stuff). Citrix is a buggy add-on that can be very expensive very quickly. For MS Office, Internet Explorer, Outlook and most basic Apps, Windows Terminal Services is probably adequate. Watch for License issues, we use an SCO terminal access client for accessing our SCO based Practice Management System that is a bit funky in the way it is licensed on a Terminal Server.
Good luck and if you want to see my whitepaper and TCO comparisons (3 2000 Sites) (3 Terminal Server Sites) with 18 months of installed base time, drop me an e-mail!
Rule of Life Number 2: Remember, it can all go to hell at any minute. --Jimmy Buffet
We got a nice little Sun setup with personalized id cards and the like so we could run our labs in user specific ways. then they decided to stop making the unix version of our software, adn we were screwed
There's no reason to use thin clients anymore, unless you already have a multiuser host that's going to waste or you can afford to buy 1 to 3 EXPENSIVE, high-power servers every few years to keep the performance of the back-end up.
PCs are cheap. Software can automate all the administration issues of caring for dozens to hundred of seats. A lot of the software is free. Managed PCs are much cheaper, and if you aggressively audit and prune the files installed on them (i.e. delete all the files that aren't absolutely required to use the PC's applications) then the file system becomes very light and you'll be surprise how much faster the PC performs. (O'Reily has a good book on Optimizing Windows 95 for Games -- ignore the title, rip off the cover if you have to bring it to work -- it has the info you need)
Look at revrdist for Macs and PCRDist for Windows. They automatically syncronize all the files and registry entries of the client to a master image (with rule sets for exceptions/iterations). You could hack something similiar together with boot floppies or rebooting the PC off the network (password protect the BIOS) and reimage the hard drive from scripts on a file server. I ran across a page on the net about someone who already did this with a linux file server, but the
Also look at http://www.infrastructures.org for UNIX-only take on the same idea as revrdist.
Once you do this, you get the best of both worlds: the zero-administration of thin clients and the local performance of fat clients. This also places a minimal load on your file servers (except when you reimage the whole lab!) because you can easily cache all the apps, files, and libs students will need on the local disk.
It's common knowledge modern OSes are complete bloatware. It's not common knowledge that you can par down the OS and apps to a bare minimum of files using an imaging file server. On a standalone PC, if you remove too many files, you can paint yourself into a corner that requires a reinstall or rescue disk/floppy to fix. With an imaging server, you can experiment by moving files out of their directories on the server, rebooting the client, and then running a few experiments or scripts to verify it all works. If it doesn't, put the files back and reboot the client again until you figure it out.
Thin Clients are hip because they're easy to sell. You can't really sell the above methodology in a shrink-wrapped box -- you have to hire and pay somebody knowledgable to do it, which makes it a hard-sell of a panacea.
Democracy. Whiskey. Sexy. Pick any two.
I work for School District #6 (www.district6.org) in Southern Oregon, where I recently had the opportunity to set up a thin-client lab for word-processing and internet browsing. Since I'm not a big fan of RedHat, I decided to put Debian on the server, and strip Debian way way down for the clients. The lab is not totally thin, as about 100M is taken up on each client (X client, fonts, basic utilities, etc.) since I didn't have enough time to research truly thin client solutions.
All the computers are donated IBM P-100s that we got from some other local agency. They've all worked very well, as the only problems we've had are hardware related (harddrives failing, etc.)
If you have any questions, feel free to go to the tech page on district6.org and click on the E-Mail link for Aaron Blew.
Good luck,
-Aaron
There are thousands of used X terminals available all over the Internet for $50. I've been buying them. I bought 30 NCD 700's for $30 each, displaying 1600x1200. I do this all the time. There's no software cost, there's no cost of ownership, and the client application host hardware is also dirt cheap. Mod me up, please.
We use Citrix in a Production environment with about 300 users but here's the kicker. We use Linux on the clients and Windows 2K on the server. This extended the life of the client workstations and gave us more control over the environment. We publish a Desktop to the clients so the user never knows the difference. We then use VNC when we have to troubleshoot, which doesn't happen often at all. Licensing is a HUGE problem with Citrix, worse than anything MS ever dreamed up. The product is nice though. We load-balance over about 20 servers and the response times are good for the user.
I'm sorry but I have to be honest here. I have known a number of people in a number of different companies that use Citrix. Some of the people were in IT, some weren't. They all have one thing in common, nightmares. I could go on and on about the different stories but they all boil down to one thing. Citrix is flaky, flakier than Windows. I think that creates some new higher order of flakiness. Windows is not UNIX. Do not attempt to expect the same remote user experience. One OS was built for single user and one was built from day 0 to be multiuser.
... no not the ones that Citrix is giving a licensing discount to lie to you, find them yourself. Ask them what their experience has been. ...and the truth shall set you free.
Look at it this way: If your Exchange server goes down, that's fine it'll be up in a few hours, you can live without email for a few hours. If your intranet server goes down, you can live without it too for a few hours. If your gateway goes down for a few hours, you can live through that too. There's always something else you can work on, hell Word dosn't need internet access (typically).
On the other hand: If the Citrix server goes down productivity is toast. You can't work on something else unless you use pen & paper. And don't think they dont go down... oh yes... they go down all the time... like a dirty two bit whore beggin for crack crumbs... *grumble* *grumble*
Find some Citrix customers in your area
-ryan
When I need a Linux thin client to hide next to a dentist's chair, like I have done in the University of Buffalo SUNY, Loma Linda University, and University of Chicago, for the orthodontic departments... I use IGEL-W thin clients. Unfortunately... IGEL has discontinued those thin clients for a fatter box that is more difficult to conceal. I have been looking for a linux thin client I can velcro to the back of an LCD monitor. Doctors do not like a bunch of hardware rearing its ugly head in their operatories. Realtronic has a similar thin client, but it comes from France and is difficult and more expensive to import. The IGEL thin client from Pennsylvania was cheaper than a copy of Hummingbird. But if I continue on this tangent, I will be seriously off topic. Anyway, I can't wait for a thin client the size of a palm pilot with all the regular ports... video/PS/2/USB etc etc yada yada.
We use Terminal Server where I work (about 400 users) and have found them very good. If you want to run Citirx on a windows platform you will need either NT4 TSE or Win2000 TSE. I dont know if you can still get the NT4 version, but it is a dog. Since we upgraded to Win2000 the reliablity and performance has being much better. We also upgraded from citrix 1.8 to Xp and found it better but quite different to administer. But the new features make it much better
WIN2000 offers a lot better functionality over NT4 but doesnt include things like load balancing which it sounds like you need. For that you need Citrix and the printing in Citrix works better as well.
Generally you should look at have no more than 50-60 users on each box.
Its also important to find a good citrix administrator because if they arent setup right you can have lots of problems.
You should also find out whether the apps will run on a TSE environment.
It also depends what platform you want to use.
Then of course you have to think about hardware...
Cheers
I'm sure the orginal poster is expecting answers like "Linux is the way" when raising such question in /.? :)
:)
As we can see the major problems lie in the budget cut. I've been working for University and we all face the problem of huge budget being spent on licence fees on every single client.
Most software vendor like Microsoft and Symantec charge per seat/per user license, thin client could save the amount spent on hardware, which is a fixed cost and very marginal. The recurrent cost spent on license fee takes a big part of the budget.
What I want to say is, thin client is not the answer to budget problem. If they really have the will to solve the problem then do not buy more license then necessary. Seeking the relative low cost alternatives(I don't need to give examples do I?
It's hard, consider the expected opposition from non-technical department like Marketing and Business school(while I could easily get CS students use OpenOffice, even LateX!). Limited access to software with 'per seat/user license' is a recommendation. Just like AutoCAD, only those who really need it shall have access to this software.
Say, OK, you Business students can have access to Microsoft Word, but the license fees spent will be charged to your department; just like CS pays for C++, Accounting pays for DacEasy, fair enough.
However, reality is reality, those lazy dinosaur in U would rather spending more money then doing things in different way. Oh well...
I personally unboxed and setup two entire labs worth of winterm machines (60 of them, all told.) The sixty machines, plus monitors, ran my employer back $30,000, though this is likely after educational/government discounts and stuff.
The software on the server side (Citrix Metaframe XP) actually seems to be working quite well. Thoughts that I had about this thin client scenario:
1) These labs are ideally suited to general use by the public, i.e. web browsing and word processing in a library or drop-in type environment. They're absolutely awful for anything else, such as photoshop, programming, video editing, etc.
2) There's no floppies on these things. Hopefully every student/user has a personal account with the server. This solution works well if you've got some means for your users to access their files from home. We've got a student-directed email server that works really well for this.
3) The IT ramifications are huge. These computers do not break. There are no moving parts; inside the winterms themselves there's just a heat sinked celeron 300. We've got them velcroed and tied down pretty tight. I suppose you could spill mountain dew in the ventillation holes, but you'd have to be pretty malicious about that. We've got no food/drink policies in labs anyway. But, with computers that don't break, what do we do? The only thing you could do to keep your job if you switched over entirely to thin clients would be to learn how to administrate the servers.
4) The cost of the hardware has got to be nothing compared to the cost of the software. I think we've got 4 gigs of ram and 4 procs split between two load-balanced NT boxes behind these 60 machines. I stress tested them with self-refeshing internet explorer pages while running several office apps. The servers performed pretty well. Big caveat: network infrastructure. Make sure your beaureaucrats allow you to keep the server on the LAN as opposed to the WAN or else you'll probably run into bandwidth problems, especially if you're not switched.
Bottom line: Thin clients are way cool for libraries and stuff, but they're not revolutionary by any means. (Heh! I love saying that! The cycles of history never cease to boggle my mind.) Don't give up your desktops just yet, though; these things are usually pretty lightweight. If you're looking to secure a couple of publically abused windows boxes, you should look into software solutions before hardware solutions. I suggest deepfreeze, a package that pretty much re-images the computer every time you reboot it (! This practically defeats the purpose of group policies!) DeepFreezeUSA.com
A final thought: you know how people are always saying, "Bah! You don't need 1ghz cpus to word process!" Well, newfangled thin clients are the ultimate manifestation of that sentiment.
Thin clients are great for email and most web browsing, but can be unusably slow for things like streaming video and CDROM courseware.
At Sun we found the #1 issue to be politics, not technology. Lab teachers want maximum flexibility with software and peripherals. Parents want kids using a "real" computer, not a dumb terminal. Students worry about big brother. Principals feel IT rules being pushed from downtown. etc. etc.
My advice: proceed carefully, there are land mines ahead for you. Good luck! :-)
A Citrix solution may be appropiate in your case. You do need to realize that the servers and server admin time are going to be expensive up front and you need to do some analysis to ensure that this will really save you money over time. I have seen people implement a Citrix solution only to find out 18 months later that 50% of their users need to run some app that requires a fat client, so they end up with half their users having uber powerful PCs. Even if you think that some of your users will end up with 'big' PCs anyhow Citrix systems can still save you money. If you have a large user base the ability to push changes to all your users enviroments easily can save you tons of money. I have seen environments where users have fat clients but still use Citrix for a core set of apps such as Office and an email client and the IT departments were claiming large cost savings becuase they were able to upgrade their entire user base to the latest version of office by only touch the few servers in their Citrix server farm. Although, if you're looking at these benifits only, keep in mind that if you have a good implementation of SMS or a similar product you can use that to effect large scale app changes also. The biggest factor that determines the success of a Citrix implemenation, IMHO, is the skill with which the servers are configured and maintained. I've seen what should have been easy systems crash and burn due to user complaints about constant downtime, and I've seen people try to run apps that I never thought would work in a Citrix environment work great because of the expertise of the admins and the careful planning and deployment of the infrastructure to support the servers.
Anyway, I've been doing this since the moment I owned more than one computer. Everything networked (local, 192.168.x.x) was either fast and running xdm, or slow and just running "X -indirect hostname" so it was only an Xterminal for the faster boxes.
Today, I am rewiring my house with CAT 6 everywhere and a few wireless access points (big house, 3 story, full basement, so lot's of space to cover. As far as Comcast knows, I have 1 computer. In fact, I have a Linksys BEFW11S4 on the cable modem. Result? 2 fast computers, and a lot of slow old boxes around the house, but even the slow ones have a good vid card and monitor, so it doesn't matter. I added a couple cheap laptops to the mix with wireless cards, and there isn't ANYWHERE (including the neighbor's back yard at a BBQ) that I can't go, and have the fastest box ever...
May sound odd, but now I grab a cheap laptop insted of a magizine when I go into the bathroom for a, well.... Anyhow, I can read slashdot insted of TV Guide in there now, and, if I want, there's always tvguide.com!
This is old school UNIX stuff. It's always been terminals on a server. Now, a cheap P200 laptop with a decent display and wireless for $250 total will get you access to your killer linux box, from anywhere, any way... And, you can show how easy KDE is and convince people to try Linux at the neighbors BBQ (even though I use BlackBox myself....).
You can get a pretty nice PC these days for $720 [not including that pesky monitor]...
Citrix showed up at my corporate HQ, a POS in sheep's clothing. The specs for the new [unnamed] software system called for an app that was easily rolled out to users, easily installed, PREFERABLY browser-based. Some corpidiot dreamed up a Citrix/terminal server bastardized POS. It did enhance communications though -- through weekly calls to the corp IT support group when printing and profiles go haywire. And when the app screws up and performs oddly, suspect that somebody is trying to 'fix' or upgrade Citrix. Run away! You should be gettin' a Dell, dude. They're cheaper than implementing Citrix or TS. Ghost your OS installs to a CD or network boot to save time.
I've set up a thin client network in a lab environment and have learned a few things about how to make it work:
1. Start off with the K12ltsp.org CDs - use the installation as a reference for setting up DHCP, TFTP, and other services on your own later.
2. Once you're comfortable with that, try a regular distro with the LTSP packages. They really are easy to install and require only minor tweaking to run properly.
3. I've had terrific success with old Dell Optiplex desktops, you can buy them on eBay all day long for under $100. The ones I use are P166 w/ 32MB ram, 2MB onboard video (enough for 16 bit 1024x768) and 3com 905 or Intel Pro/100 network cards. Unplug the HD and CDROM, you don't need them and the PC is virtually silent without them. Make a boot floppy from the rom-o-matic website and away you go.
4. Don't skimp and use 10Mb networking, spend a few extra bucks and get 100Mb switches. Not for the throughput, but rather the reduced latency. Not a huge difference, but when you figure that every pixel update, every mouse twitch, and every keystroke has to traverse the network the latency is noticable.
Once you see how incredibly easy a thin client network is to setup and manage, you'll never go back to fat workstations. Have fun!
...using new software that promises to make things cheaper and easier:
It doesn't.
c-hack.com |
has implemented a thin client solution for their city offices, purportedly saving millions and providing top-notch service at the same time. Read about it here:
0 /1 441239&mode=thread
http://www.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=01/08/1
(Score: -1, Stupid)
I was a real big fan of Citrix 4-5 years ago until Microsoft got ahold of them, dolled them up in "Ho" garb, and sold them as a "Microsoft" solution (i.e. Terminal Server).
Go the VNC route. You (and your pocketbook) won't be sorry!
Ohlone College is in the first semester of implementation of a thin client network. Were using Sun Ray thin clients connect via Tarantella to MS-Terminal Servers on the back-end. Authentication is accomplished via LDAP. The real problem we've encountered has been with the MS-Terminal Servers. In an open lab environment we've work from the assumption that the user will treat the servers in hostile fashion, which on occasion proves true. Through the group policies we can lock down the desktops well enough for most curriculums. But for computer science for the students to accomplish their work the must have a good deal of access to the systems. In this situation we find were currently rebuilding Computer Science Terminal Server system load weekly. This is a huge pain. Other considerations are licensing of software. We found we had to implement a key-server to stay legal with many of applications running on the terminal servers. As far as Citrix Vs. Tarantella about the only thing that Citrix will get you that Tarantella wont is audio. Tarantella will hopefully be adding audio support soon. Considering the difference in price Citrix didn't offer that much more.
We implemented Metaframe XP on Windows 2000 at work in November. We moved from thick clients to Metaframe servers with an ICA client running on Linux thin clients. I put together a server and created a boot CD which boots using DHCP and mounts root over NFS. You could also use floppies.
The server holds an image for each hardware configuration, since we only have a total of 4 video/nic combinations. The server is a PII-300 with 128MB of RAM, and a 9GB SCSI HD. We had this box and another identical box laying around. I have them set up so that one can take the other's place if it were to go down (it never has). We have 40 clients using thin clients in this way.
This was an interim measure because we didn't have the money to purchase new hardware last year.
Recently we started replacing the old desktops with Wyse thin clients, which run a proprietary operating system in ROM, and come with a USB keyboard and mouse (without wheel) for $300. I set up an FTP server for them to retrieve firmware updates from.
But back on the Linux thin clients. They boot very quickly compared to Windows, and present a Windows 2000 logon screen. Ctrl-Alt-Del and the Windows key work exactly as expected. The only drawback (the way that _I_ put it together) is that the thin clients don't have any unique configuration, such as screen resolution. But there are ways to get around that (but I haven't needed to).
Gawd. When I get time, I will document this project on my site. If you'd like more info, email me at robin d0t daugherty a+ ovf d0t com.
Hello little man. I will destroy you!
Actually, if you go with a thin client solution primarily as an effort to discourage theft of PCs, you need to make sure you go with *really* thin clients.
For example, most thin clients I've seen (such as Wyse WinTerms) that run embedded Windows NT (often called NTE) come with a decent-sized flash disk chip in them, and use standard DIMM memory sticks. Basically, they're a full-fledged PC in a very small case with no need for CPU or cooling fans. They're quite desirable for re-purposing for other projects, such as an in-car MP3 player or a dedicated firewall/router.
I'd think anyone interested enough in PCs to steal parts from them, or "downgrade" the systems, would *love* to grab a thin client of this type to drag back to the dorm and hack around on.
You probably want to use something that only runs Windows CE from firmware and can't do anything but terminal emulation and Citrix ICA connections.
Make sure your anti-viral software works with Citrix! It might seem obvious, but you'll probably hafta go expensive enterprise AV if you wanna have your Windoze virus-free... OTOH if you use Veritas backup the AV is generally built-in, and with your thin client philosophy you probably don't want any unauthorized apps running.
my 2 cents: Citrix is nifty but setup can be a bitch.
--you have been trolled--
One advantage that I havn't seen mentioned, is that you can have WinNT4, Win2K, Solaris AND Linux servers for your lab. Then, as long as you get a thin client that can access Citrix and VNC sessions, then a user can connect to any of the above OS's.
Don't listen to the whiners that say the Citrix/Windows solution is unreliable. I use both Citrix on NT Terminal server and Citrix on Win2k every day, works great, requires a reboot every month or two. Personally I prefer Unix, but a college needs to be able to provide Win32 environments as well.
I'm a senior SysAdmin at an Engineering firm, for me the advantage is flexibility. My office PC runs Linux, but I don't really use it except as a thin client. I have Virtual Desktops open to Linux, Solaris and Win2k.
So why use a Linux thin client to access a Linux Server? Because I can bring up that virtual desktop from anywhere in the building. If I'm at a user's desk, I can simply bring up my virtual desktop and have all of my task programs open and ready to go. Likewise if I'm spending time in the computer room. Way Cool...
The only downside is that multimedia sucks on a thin client. Otherwise, as long as the network is reasonably fast (switched 10Mb is fine), then performance is very usable.
Good luck,
Brad
We have encountered this situation and studied it well. We ended it with the regular client server based.
Since you are using Windows platform, it will cost you to do thin client services rather than the traditional client server based.
First, getting a terminal license from Microsoft costs around an OEM copy of Windows XP. Second, if you are going to you Citrix, the licensing costs are also high for it. So you are already costing more for the terminal server.
Third, for hardware, you will support around 40-50 users / server with a typical Dual P3-1.2GHZ with around 6GB RAM! The server itself will cost you a lot since you will really need to get a fat one to serve lots of users. More costs to the deployment of a thin client system. Besides, you will put memory in the thin client, motherboard, cpu but you *do not utilitize* them. Such a waste of hardware resources.
Since I think you are having problems with management, I suggest that you enforce group policy in Windows NT/2000 systems. This will at least ease administration as what I am doing right now with more than 100 computers and growing. I almost do not maintain the client computers at all since I practically restrict everything except for their intended applications to be used by the user.
Chow!
Live your life each day as if it was your last.
At my university, in the engineering labs theft like this is a huge problem. People even steal the balls out of mice.
In the CS labs, its much less of a problem. Why? Because there are big, very obvious cameras.
Two-disk Xwindows might do the trick - Or you might even be able to scrounge up some of those old 2.88mb floppy drives.
"...I can set up that system in THREE notes - I mean, disks!"
Take the route that many budget-constrained organisations will take: use a non-M$ OS. Microsoft's licencing will only get more and more extortionist as time passes. They have even stopped allowing the free download of hotfixes for 2000 and XP. Now you have to call a Seattle number (on your dime, no 800 or 877) and pay $195 for them to send you an encrypted URL and a password. You *may* get the fee waived if you piss and moan enough, but not likely. Don't give Microsoft anymore money than you have to. Avoid the Redmond Tax!
I work for a company that uses Citrix Metaframe and Windows 2000 terminal server, as well as a mix of PCs and thin clients.
.GIF and .JPG files suddenly becoming associated with a shareware package (like LView Pro), which isn't even installed on our Citrix servers. Then, nobody can view the images by double-clicking on them in Windows Explorer until we change it back again.
So far, I've come to a few conclusions.
1. Be *very* cautious about deciding to serve an entire Windows desktop to the clients. There are unbelievable security/configuration headaches you'll encounter as time goes on. (Basically, what happens is a user can install a program while using the Citrix desktop. Even if he/she doesn't have the administrator rights that are required to succeed in installing the application to the Citrix server, it can still end up writing some changes to the system registry before it fails.) We've seen things like
2. Internet Explorer (or any web browser, for that matter) runs very poorly when served through a Citrix ICA session. It will work pretty well viewing a static HTML page, but things like Shockwave and Flash video will clobber the Citrix server's CPU and update very sluggishly on the client's system that's viewing it. Unfortunately, if you try getting around this by letting users run a locally installed browser instead, you can't easily handle things like their own personal sets of bookmarks/shortcuts, or cookies.
3. As others have already pointed out here, printing from inside Citrix is troublesome. We've had issues with print notifications going to the wrong user (never did get a decent explanation from Citrix on why this happens out the blue, every so often). More importantly, some printer drivers just refuse to work properly in a Citrix environment.
4. Avoid thin clients that come with "embedded NT" (NTE)! That's all we're using right now for thin clients (Netier XL1000 and XL2000's), and they're bad news. They take a LONG time to boot up, and they're too much like using a full-blown PC, minus the hard drive and cooling fans. Since they do still need the special "embedded" version of the OS, you have to pay the manufacturer's inflated prices to make you new OS images when you want to upgrade them. (They told me just to switch to embedded Linux on our Netiers, it would probably cost in the ballpark of $2000-2500 to have Wyse engineering work up a custom master image for us.) Then too, the "management software" they provide for most thins is less than stellar. At best, you get the exact same functionality you'd get using something like the latest verison of Symantec Ghost on your PCs (with the new Ghost Console). More often, you get a buggy system manager that requires learning yet another proprietary scripting language to push software updates to your thin clients.
We use Citrix extensively in our enterprise WAN, and for a while we were having the problem you describe of print jobs mysteriously appearing at any one of our 25 sites across 10 counties. Turned out that we had two problems with our setup.
Marnex Products
If you would be interested in a linux solution, check out K-12 Linux. It's designed for elementary/high schools, but it could easily be adapted to fit your situation. I've done some messing around with linux thin clients, and it's not too difficult to get a pretty good setup going.
----
All of whose base are belong to the what-now?
At the local college here, we have 8 Citrix ICA servers (nice, dual proc 1ghz xeon, tons ram) running NT4.0 terminal server. Its a nice fit for the students/fac, and the NT shop that is ran here (we're working on changing it). We were buying a few of these WYSE winterms to deploy across campus to allow access, but at over $800 a pop those things get expensive in a hurry.
So, in order to save money and provide loads more functionality, we bought a thinknic and i went about the process of hacking the hell out if it. there are tons of websites (hack-a-nic.com, and yahoo's groups are just 2) that describe the in's and out's of this $199 piece of hardware.
all in all, they are pretty easy to hack. the standard OS is based of debian i believe, and runs 2.2.x (i forget). anyway, the window manager is blackbox and you can change the menus a bit to add right-click desktop functionality and turn off the always-on netscape session. I have ours with a custom background, and updated version of citrix, mozilla instead of netscape, and links to a telnet client and ssh. i also have one that i am testing that uses a PAM module to authenticate off of the NT domain so the user can open and run a couple of native apps like abiword and gnumeric and save their work to their NT network drive.
We now have about 25 of these things scattered across campus, and they work great. you could also use them to connect to a linux terminal server instead of windows. Next up for us is providing full X-terminal functionality to a couple of linux servers to provide remote application support. these are really nifty boxes.
Fat pencils and Big Chief tablets!
VNC is a wonderful remote access option in a heterogenous environment. Can't agree with you more. Unfortunately, that doesn't appear to be what he's asking for here. He's talking about thin clients, and allowing his anemic client machines to share the resources of a centralized server, much like the old terminal and mainframe model.
Both Citrix and Microsoft support this with Windows NT, in a horrible, expensive, kludgy way. Instead of trying to outsmart Windows, which is laid out in a single-user mentality from the get go, my suggestion would be to stop defeating yourself, and go to X Windows and Unix.
Having plugged X Windows, I need to air a gripe of mine, about Qt and Gtk. Both of these toolkits are extremely sleek, easy to program for, and have a bounty of nice apps. Unfortunately, both of them use far too little of X Windows' API, focussing primarily on maintaining and updating a dizzying number of pixmaps. This is done, of course, to support themes, which are flashy and fun, and for succinct, portable code. This means Gtk and Qt apps most likely will not work as quickly across the wire, as they do in a single user environment.
Depending on what you are doing, perhaps you want to consider:
A) Thin clients, with centralized application servers, and retrofitting your old workstations to be X terminals.
B) Glorified dumb terminals.. This is a favorite of power users. Provide your users with stripped down unix workstations with X Windows, nfs shared home directories, and centralized app servers. Your users ssh in to the app servers, and use console apps to exclusion.
C) Managed Workstations. Those fossils can often be given new life with a healthy injection of RAM and a decent network card. Repurpose their hard drives for swap space, and learn to love bootp and distributing your apps via NFS. Your applications are centralized, as is your OS image, so it's very easy for you to manage what apps they get. Your fossils can crap out on you, without serious impact to your client. This allows you to use the slick new generation of X11 apps, without incurring a latency hit for the interface.
I've implemented all three of these, at different sites. Best of luck!
Weapons of Mass Analysis
At work I implemented a Citrix Metaframe XP solution, and have had nothing but good luck since day one. It solves all of the problems that I have run into with Terminal Services vanilla, like printing and allowing users seamless access to their local hard drives. A bit of a pain to license, but better than anything else I've seen that ends in XP. :)
The wyse terminals that have been discussed are creamy as well, just point it to the right IP and go!
Good luck with your decision.
I wouldn't reccommend citrix for a computer lab environment, especially a large one, even with many servers.
Where I work we recently deployed citrix, but for a relatively small number of users. We have a dual athalon with 4GB ram. I personally think the cost is out of control, and performance isn't what Metafram would have you believe.
But, if you already have windows machines, it's not worth it to use Citrix. Why? MS Terminal server. The only reason you really need Citrix is if you want clients for any platform. From what I am told, Bandwidth usage ends up being close wether you use Citrix ICA or not. And you have to pay for overpriced TSCALs either way.
Keep your Windows machines and run the Terminal Server client on them if you're forced to go that route. A real machine is going to be better for anything that needs processor power. Matlab or Photoshop on a terminal server? Forget it.
I'm an administrator of a rather large citrix/TS network (40+ servers). my experience is citrix is a very slick method of delivering "productivity windows applications(Office type, email, department-type applications etc..) to users that either are scattered all over the place or if a company has several types of desktop OS's (*nix, MAC, windows) or older hardware. Citrix has clients for all types of OS's and also provides Java and ActiveX plug-in's for browser based solutions. I've implemented both and found them a god-send for my remote users. We can use client-auto update to push out new citrix clients when needed. This is the positive side. People who are sick of the client/server world don't realize the Thin-client solutions can be every bit of a PITA as client server if a person try's to deploy applications onto a Citrix/Windows solution without 1st evaluating what they need. My advice is to stick with productivity applications and stay away from CAD, memory and CPU intensive applications, graphic type of programs, streaming media and sound types of solutions. Yes you can buy add-in's but it would cost $$. If you try to just integrate the 16 bit POS applications, adhoc types of database query app's, better check to see if you benefit package offers therapy, thin-client ain't for you! IIRC, most of the classes i took at a local community college involved compiling programs, trying stuff out. This is bad for many reasons but it would eat CPU and memory. Now your affecting the whole lab instead of one user. *Horror story of Citrix/Metafrme* They released a product called Metaframe XP, this is a method of centralizing licensing, maintenance of published applications, which servers use these app's and users that are granted rights to them. This is all fine and dandy, it looked great on the white board but after implementing metaframe XPe 1.0 to some servers. We ran into a case where one of the clients wasn't connecting too good to the Citrix/MF server. Called Citrix and they recommend deploying FR(future release 1)/SP 1. Low and behold we did that and in a couple of days we had other users calling they were unable to log into a non-FR1/SP 1 metaframe server. Called citrix and they stated a person has to upgrade all metaframe servers in the farm to sp1 with 48 hours. OK! WTF i say, its like saying you need to create a new microsoft domain or Novell tree everything a hotfix or service pack comes out. The only other way to have a gradual upgrade of a service pack is to create a new farm and migrate every server into the new farm. PITA!" Citrix can be a god-send for remote users and many platforms, watch out for what we just mentioned above. This is the windows side and I'm open-minded enough to look at other solutions that are mentioned in the replies from the OS community. AS with any service your trying to deliver, if your trying to fit a square peg into a round hole, it just won't work. I'm so pissed at citrix we are looking at alternatives because its a F*****n nightmare to migrate and maintain this. less than 10 servers i can see but as when it comes to a very large user base as I have. I'm screwed. YOu mention 500 user stations, that'd represent about 5 - 6 four cpu with 2 to 4 gig of memory server class boxes. the rule i've used is 25 or so users per cpu. There are 3 types of users(casual, medium and power user) casual (1 - 2 app's, casual login's) 3 - 7 meg of memory per session medium (2 - 5 app's, frequent login's) 8 - 12 meg of memory per session power (3 - 8 app's, primary desktop(Secretary types) 15 - 25 meg per session Truely watch out, its a double edged sword. I'm glad you posted this cause i'm going to check out other thin-client solutions mentioned in the replies. Any other questions let me know.
Untrue. I have citrix farm at work running Win2K server and Metaframe1.8 that hosts roughly 300 users concurrently. They are running everything from IE5.5sp1 to the Lotus Smatrsuite millenium tools and everyone of them runs Lotus Notes (HOG!) The machines are 4way Xeon 550's and 4 gigs of ram. Granted it's not as fast a having a fat machine on your desk but it saves a lot of money in the long run. The ability to centrally administer and troubleshoot problems is awesome. Now I am not saying it is the best solution for your situation, but I don't like to see people citrix bashing, if you need a MS based environment nothing is better. If MS compatability is not a necessity then you can go either way.
"Boys have a Penis, Girls have a Vagina", kids say the darndest things!
VNC is your answer. Period (in my opinion) the point being that if it's good enough to run the ATT UK research lab (formally Olivetti Research lab) it's surely good enough for your University. It works both ways. (from or to linux/mac/windows) can be secured over ssh and requires a minimul system on the "recieving" end. ( I've used a 486 as the terminal end quite nicely). You can find out all the info/numbers you will need at www.uk.research.att.com/vnc
I'm sorry, I'm to tired to be witty at the moment so this message will have to do.
The company I work for has deployed over 3,000 linux thin clients in 26 different states, and every one of them is managed by TWO people. Its scalable, CHEAP AS HELL, and INCREADBILY manageable. If you want more info, contact me via email.
"This above all, to thine own self be true"
Same for us - we run a large environment which has to encompass a lot of remote sites and we have been running citrix metaframe 1.8 and now Xp with NT and 2000 terminal server. We use WYSE thin client boxes and they are good value, invredibly reliable and the newer ones have a customised windows CE configuration - you dont even need to have an ip for the server you can configure for a domain and load balance the farm as we do, the first available server (we run 18 load balanced) picks up the client connection and runs with it - if you get your links up to a decent speed this is an option but if not (in the case of remote sites) i adivse setting them to connect to a specific server and then if thats not availble they will choose another - this cuts down on profile copying between boxes (citrix is heavily profile based - stored on the home server of the user).
Publishing APPS is extremely simple and is easier than Windows Terminal Server - this solution is not the best and citrix offers advantages over it.
The things to be aware of / cons
1. Bandwidth - citrix claim 32kb is used by each full delivered client - dont believe them if your users use large databases or financial sofwtare - aim for an overhead of at least half this again and spec the link accordingly x number of users and add an extra 10% - i run 10 people over a 320k link which can be slow under heavy load - increasing this to 384k seemed to give me better performance and 512k made it very fast.
2. User issues - the clients will piss users of if they have had PC's - they have NO cd roms, no floppy drives and the things you can do on a normal PC (like installing software) cannot be done on metaframe - it's a very secure solution and if you are smart and want to lower support you will lock down the desktop and scrensavers and set the default screen res to 1024x768 - this is what we have found to be best, when a user logs into my farm they get a blank screen with no icons and a limited programs selection in the start menu - all of their applications are delivered in a program neighbourhood window. also lock the size of caches and internet files down to a minimum size - long login times are often related to large internet caches.
Users do like it once they get used to it and from a support view the thing is great full remote control built in means you can see instantly what a user is doing, the admin tools are fantastic and support is a cinch. All drives and printers are simply login script homed (we use Kixstart but are moving to an active directory domain so thats changing) and file perissions and access to application farms are as simple as configuring domain groups.
Once you get it worked out its worth the considerable cost, run a license gateway and you dont need overtly large licenses - a license not in use on one server can be used by another and by using load balancing a fault tolerance can be built in (a session will be terminated is a server goes down but a user can log straight back into another)
I liked it so much that even though im the manager i got my CCA (citrix Certified Administrator) and im working on my CCEA (Citrix Certified Enterprise Administrator) if youre looking for a cert which offers returns on investment the CCEA is it but YOU MUST be a REAL mcse as it needs a pretyy deep knowledge base (Paper MCSE should not bother)
Citrix is used heavily in University environmments (i know of 6 here in australia alone) so check it out at them.
PS a note - The downside to citrix is it needs MEATY server - i buy Quad Xeon's with 2.5gb ram and 80gb raids for them - it needs it.
I refuse to argue with Anonymous Cowards - if you want a discussion get an account....
You can use Windows 2000 Server/Adv.Server directly. No need for Citrix as a go-between. Save yourself quite a bit of money. If it's the cross-platform compatibilty you want, RDesktop allows any Unix machine to connect to a Windows NT 4 or 2000 Terminal Server.
The advantages of thin clients are quite impressive. For one thing, instead of a lot of unused CPU power going to waste on idle machines while others are at their max, the resources are shared evenly among all those connected.
Centralized management is WONDERFUL. Before (and currently on the video-intensive system) I would just make one simple change to the system, and spend just over an hour cloning the ~40 systems in each lab room. Of course, what makes that more interesting is knowing: before I came, they were just using Ghost to clone hard drives from a fileserver. At ~70 Minutes per system, I'm amazed they could manage the lab before I showed up.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Let me guess.. a student lab would probably need to run Microsoft Office. You can run some linux office tool, but I'd rather have my students go out of school with experience on Microsoft Office rather than StarOffice. Call me biased... but i want everyone that graduates to be able to use Word, Excel and Powerpoint, because their employers will expect it... yep, I can hear the blood boil, but I couldn't care less about /. opinion, I care about the students.
So, bye bye linux solution.
Terminal services is fairly expensive. The advantage is that they students don't lose much functionality.
There are gotchas, so the smart thing to do is to pilot the project in a single lab, and see how things go. You may even be able to convince the M$ rep to fund the pilot lab for free, with the promise that if it works out, you buy a lot more licenses. It's done all the time.
Again.. requirements! What are they? What software will you run? What will your students expect? If the computers will be used by students who need to compile their programs for C++ class, thin clients may not be a smart idea. If all they do is surf and use office, it may work.
The main problem being students messing up with the windows configurations and storing personal files created by the users, we came along with the following solution:
- Keep user homes on powerful UNIX servers.
- Install one Linux server in each lab hall (approx one Linux server for each 40-50 PC; a 300 MHz oldish PC with 64 M RAM and a few GB HDD perfectly does the job.
- NFS Mount various home trees on the main server(s) to these lab servers.
- Setup Lab servers to provide print spooling and print quota checks
- Setup lab servers with Samba server; make them domain controllers
- setup lab PCs to authenticate from lab servers. This is the worst part. NT, XP wont do this. Believe it or not, we have the best solution with Win95. Win98 also works, but any win beyond that simply doesnt work.
- Configure lab PCs to have access only to printer(s) in the same lab
- Use some incremental disk restoration program (PC-Rdist is a good one) so that when a student logs out, the Windows settings and any deleted files are restores; any new files added by teh user are cleaned up (except the home directories of course).
- Keep a Windows system disk image on each lab server so in case a machine fails beyond the repair capability of incremental restorer, you can restore a full image over the LAN.
Everybody is happy with the above configuration. The average up-time for PCs have increased to 98%. Access is limited to only students and staff (since a domain logon is enforced). Printer and disk quotas a re under control since these services are in fact provided by UNIX machines. Cookies and other personal information are removed from the pcs when somebody logs out.As far as general security audits are concerned, the net admin will have a log of who used which pc, when and for how long.
The cost is just the cost of an extra PC to be configured as lab server and since you dont need a hell of a peformance on these, any old PC can be used.
Using thin clients in Win env is a dream. The only solution in the markets seems to be Citrix but is certainly is NOT designed for lab environments. They expect users to load one or two applications into the RAM in the morning and use only them till they leave their offices.
get a look at www.qualystem.com
They have networked diskless Windows PCs, et boot-from-RO-media PCs.
Obviously some setups will be more shoestring than others. One of the nice things about using tiny local install of *nix with something like KDE on the server end is that you can basically throw anything at all at it. I've used virtually-abandoned Indigos for this in labs, and it works great - the same thing would work for all of those forgotten 603e and 604 Macs that most universities have laying around. You'll want a fast network no matter what you do, but for reclaiming otherwise obsolete hardware, X+KDE+remote logins is great.
Have you looked at Win4Lin? Win4Lin offers Windows 95 or 98 as an application on Linux, and the company that makes it (NeTraverse) also offers a thin-client multi-user solution (NeTraverse Server Standard Edition). You get the stability of Linux and the ability to use Windows apps as well.
Actually the issue with windows terminal server (if you mean that) is that its not diskless - you need an os to run it - i dont know if there are linux clients for it or not so that may not be a problem.
The great thing about citrix is the range of clients available - i have as a test done an install on a 486SX16 notebook and dialed in - dos client only for dial in (configuration was a breeze) and then it runs a full Citrix Desktop - i have seen it done with 485 machines and i know of at least one company using P166 machines with slakware running a linux client for Full windows desktop - its a great cheap solution to dedicated thin terminals.
The thing about many other terminal server solutions is they need an os to run on top of - windows or otherwise - with citrix you can use terminals or i believe there is even a bootable floppy client for it so no internal harddrives are needed on older machinery.
Im told it will run on XT's but have never seen it done. This is one product that is worth the money.
I refuse to argue with Anonymous Cowards - if you want a discussion get an account....
Actually as a big user of Winterms we have hacked them apart and played with them - they dont run Windows NT they Run a WINCE solution customised and theres not much else you can do with them - we have hacked them apart and they wont work outside of citrix networks - thats firmware designed and even with the flash disk theres nothing you can do - plus they cost about $500 and come with a security point for a standard notebook lock - you would be more likely to lose the keyboard or mouse.
On another note i put locks on the back of all of my pcs - users cant get them open, they cost about $2 in bulk (lockwood or yale) and they can be reused.
I refuse to argue with Anonymous Cowards - if you want a discussion get an account....
I am using IBM thinclients (type 8363, model exx)
to run linux. They work great. Also they are less expensive than the SunRay's and the server can be any linux machine that if powerful enough for the workload that you give it. To run the SunRay's you need a Sun server and these don't come cheap. Have a look at IBM Thinclients if you are interested in a solution like this.
We used chain.
We just put the computers into a kind of a locked wire cage, which was welded into the desk. For additional assurance, we chained the computers to the desks.
Not one computer was stolen, everyone was happy. Cost $40 per seat, but of course we could reuse the cages and chain whenever we upgraded the equipment.
When I tried, I couldn't get any C++ compilers (including gcc) to work over Citrix. Could you please tell us how you got them to work?
We use citrix in our prod environment because our users were allowed to buy their own software, not realizing that the current harware configurations were not powerful enough to run the software. So our management decided that instead of telling the users, "I guess you bought a pile of junk you can't use", decided to throw good money after bad and installed citrix. While citrix works, kind of, it is expensive, overly complex to set up and trouble shoot and is prone to crashing.
Can you tell I hate my short sighted, obsequious management?
Cat
You are absolutely right. As I mentioned, one of the big perks of Citrix, is the fact that it has a client for any OS. There are terminals however that support RDP and therefore WTS. The Terminal Server Client software does only run windows based machines. I haven't tried it with Wine or anything like that. There are projects to port RDP to *NIX.
Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels.
Just installed 5 wyse with 3 win98 and 2 win2000 machines connected to SBS Server with SQL feeding a Health Program based on Access.
My experience tells me that wyse are hassle free compared to beefed up clients. They come with built in browser, LDP and RDP, WinCE and plenty of printer driver support. As time goes by we will migrate all clients to wyse. Terminal Services with CAL licenses is expensive but if you log in using only terminal services then you will not need CAL licenses. However my recommendation is buy extra CALs. In the long run we will save on thin clients.
I administer over 500 lab machines as well. We use cheap Dell Optiplexes in our labs and replace 1/3 of them each year. The ones we replace we sell to the students for about $300 dollars. We have tried testing citrix and we did not like it. Instead we use a program called PCRdist (http://www.pyzzo.com) it is so simple to use, basicaly all you need is a network accessable drive (ie. Novell, samba, etc...) then the machines can refresh from the image on the server. We have it set to run on every logout.
I have worked extensively with these products for a government department here in Canada of about 1800 users. We recently implemented W2K with Metaframe to run MS Office and other apps. We implemented a bunch of 1U servers(1.2GHz,1GB) loadbalanced using Citrix products. The per server costs including software(Citrix) are less than $25,000CAD excluding user applications(divide by approx 1.6 for US). /or
Each Server will take about 40 concurrent connections(users). For 500 users 15 servers would do nicely with extra for development and
Business hour upgrades.(If you have extra servers they may be taken out of the farm and upgraded during regular hours reducing OT.)
15*$25000=$375,000CAD
$375,000/500=$750 per user
Substaintial savings just in initial hardware and software. 500 PCs at $1000per would be $500,000.
Plus deployment would be more complicated and ongoing support would be greater.....I could go on and on but don't have time. Look closely at the Terminal Server Citrix solutions...trust me you'll save in initial and ongoing support costs.
The reason the Sunrays are quiet is because they consume relatively little power. I have seen investment banks changing form PCs to Sunrays because of the heat and air conditioning issues - each trader can run up to 6 screens, and if he/she has six PC base units under his/her desk that's a lot of heat.
...
... a true follow-me desktop.
And as far as software is concerned, a Sunray is a vanilla Solaris environment which equals free StarOffice. Work out what Sun's doing with Staroffice licensing
And if you put the Sunray clients and smartcards together with Tarantella, you have an environment you can use in the office on the Sunray, at home via your laptop/ISP, in the internet cafe via the java client in a browser
Dunstan
The last scintilla of doubt just rode out of town
They even give away free CPU's
http://www.riverdale.k12.or.us/linux/
Where ever you go, There you are
Hi there, I am the Senior Systems Admin for a large public school division, 8000 client systems, 191 servers spread out over 91 seperate locatations.
We tryed citrix, too expensive, and not so functional, LTSP and K12LTSP are both being tested in our evironment, all is working well, user acceptance is very high, we have 40 users on the K12LTSP project, and 170 on an LTSP server each machine is a 1.5 gigahertz Dell 1400 SC server RAID 5, and half a gig of ram.
client systems are PII 350 IBM workstations with no hardrives...everything is excelent
If HOWTO's are so Damn good.. then why the heck do we have so many sites devoted to support ?
I work at a hospital, and we've begun deploying thin clients that run a citrix desktop. The servers are Xeons running win2k advanced server. The clients are from Neoware and run linux. We can shadow the thin clients at any stage of running, and flashing new apps to them is a breeze. The clients are quick, stable, and not overly expensive. Users love it because they can go anywhere in the hospital, sit at one, and get the same apps, the same desktop, and all their little customizations. Those of us in IS like it because they're simple to work with, and you can shadow them and assist users without hassle. They're also much harder for the users to completely f*ck up.
Citrix can be a great solution. It can be stable, fast, redundant, it can be easy to manage, or it can be a big waste of time, money and effort.
Citrix is NOT likely to save you a lot of money unless the type of deployment you're trying to do fits in well with Microsoft and Citrix's respective licensing models. If you're a school with towering stacks of old PCs that you can re-use as Citrix terminals, then you can do okay as far as hardware costs but licensing will still get you.
However, if you know what you're doing, you can make the management of your user apps a lot easier. You can control what users can access what apps from a central management tool. You can "shadow" users to see what they're doing wrong, and most times you can fix issues from your desk, or from the server, instead of hitting hundreds of desktops. Yes, you can do a lot of these things with other tools (PCAnywhere/VNC/ControlIT, SMS, etc) but these features are all nicely integrated with Citrix.
It really shines for remote access. Make friends with your firewall operator and you can do some really cool things with "webifying" your desktop apps with VERY little effort, and allow all your users to work from home, or on the road, accessing their apps and files through a browser. This isn't marketing fluff, I've done it.
It's not a great solution for everything, but it does have it's place. It has its problems, too, but anyone willing to spend a little time learning about it (or outsourcing someone who already has) can get a lot out of it. Just understand up front what it costs, think about what you want to do with it, and ask yourself if it's worth the expense to you.
I rarely post here, but this is one subject in which I have some in-depth background.
I've evaluated Citrix Metaframe XP(no relation to the Windows XP product) as well as Windows 2000 Terminal Services in a large(several thousand node) network.
Win2k term. svcs gives you data compression, bitmap caching, the ability to control client/drive mappings, and a bunch of other things. The only additional features I see in the Citrix software is cross-platform support(MacOS plus some unices), control of what applications the end-users can run, and some advanced encryption. Everything else is already included in Win2K Term. Svcs.
For the price tag, and the poor quality of the cross platform support, I really couldn't justify the cost of Metaframe except we *had* to support the Mac plaforms somehow and this was the only way out. Bear in mind that Metaframe runs *on*top*of* Windows 2000 Terminal Services, so you'll have to fork over the money for M$ Terminal Services no matter what.
Of course, if there were a good Linux solution to the problem, and our users could install/configure software for themselves, we'd be doing that instead. I know of no Unix based solutions that can do what Terminal Services does.
Hope it helps.
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I've been interviewed by a nationally distributed magazine about technology in education, concerning thin clients. I've got no agenda, only my opinions.
Sleep is just a poor substitute for caffeine, anyway. -Bob Lehmann
Take a look at http://www.aspelle.com. Aspelle Everywhere offers, in conjunction with Microsoft Terminal Services, an alternative to Citrix. Aspelle Everywhere enables access to your resources, including Terminal Services, Citrix, Telnet, AS400 and Web applictions securely over the Internet.