Windows Thin Clients - Worth Making the Switch?

Brendtron 5000 asks: "I work in the IT department of a major Canadian university. I've been given the task of investigating the pros/cons and costs associated with switching from Windows desktop machines to some kind of thin client solution. Both student lab and administrative machines are up for possible replacement. At first blush it seems that the cost savings will be considerable, given that thin clients are much cheaper and easier to maintain than a user controlled desktop machine. What were your experiences with switching to/managing thin client environments? Have the users been happy with thin clients? Did the cost savings materialize as expected?"

Comments

My school uses thin clients and they're annoying

[nxtw]

My school replaced some (Windows 98) systems with Wyse thin clients. I'm not sure how many issues are due to my school's specific configuration/ignorance. If there are any software updates available for the thin clients, I'm sure they aren't installed. The servers run off of Windows 2000 with Citrix MetaFrame. They had three IP addresses in the configuration settings on the terminals.

I don't know how much the devices are supposed to be locked down, but anyone can go in and change the settings. I use them to connect to my remote hosts over RDP. Monitor/network settings will save between reboots, but the server list is cleared after every reboot. While the devices autoconnect to the server upon startup, the login eventually times out, and the session disconnects.

If a lot of people try to connect at once, about half of the systems time out. Since there were three IP addresses in the configuration settings, I assumed that the devices were sticking on one IP address and not trying the rest. This appears to be the case, as picking a different IP address seemed to help.

The printer settings also pose another problem. The same servers/published application is used for terminals in two different parts of the same building. Both rooms have their own laser printers. If you happen to be in the room that doesn't have its printer set as default, you either have to remember what room number you're in and change the printer (something half of the people in there fail to do) or walk down to the other room and get your printout.

I've noticed a few issues that are definitely with the thin clients themselves. Sometimes, they decide that they don't want to work properly anymore -- mostly on RDP connections. The screen will stop updating for a few seconds, then go black. Sometimes, the systray icons will show up, and about 10% of the time, the connection will decide to come back, but otherwise, the connection just stays on that black screen, and any subsequent reconnect attempts time out. The clients have to be rebooted before you can reconnect to any new hosts at this point.

Once again, if there any firmware updates that would fix this issue, they probably aren't applied.

using thin clients at a call center

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been using LTSP to serve thin clients at a call center for almost six months now (Linux, not Windows, though), and I can honestly say that all the problems I anticipated never materialized. In fact, the biggest issue has been callers sticking gum in my CD drives.

Setting up LTSP is a snap, thanks to the great wiki at http://wiki.ltsp.org/ and the very helpful people on the mailing list.

The *really* hard part is just getting through your brain how exactly thin clients boot off the network, and establish a connection to X remotely. Once that starts to make sense, you really can get it working quickly and easily. There are just so many variables to start off with (NFS, X, XDMCP, PXE, DHCP, TFTP, Etherboot) at the beginning that there's a real learning curve. Once it's working though, it Just Works(tm). It's great.

Just setup a decent firewall to block outgoing stuff to where you don't want them to go, and make sure you give the clients lots of options when it comes to software. Working in a call center can't be the highlight of anybody's life, so I made sure to give them their choice of 4 window managers (GNOME, KDE, XFCE, Flux) and I put all the little games on there to keep them happy in their downtime.

The problems I worried about the most never materialized -- there's no process load, the connection is really fast never laggy (even with 35+ users connected all at once), and everyone picked up really quickly how to switch their preferences around, log in, and get their work done. I never should have put it off as long as I did. It's so much easier than having 40 separate windows installs to worry about and reflash / reinstall / reconfigure when one gets any kind of problems.

And last of all, with LTSP you can throw *any* kind of cheap hardware in the mix, and they all run equally fast. I had a few Pentium 100s on the network for a while, and you couldn't tell any difference in performance compared to the Athlon XPs.

Re:using thin clients at a call center

[NefariousAryq]

We also use LTSP, but in a completely different style. We operate an event photography business, where we go out and photograph all sorts of school events and sports; Soccer tournaments, Baseball tournaments, Show choir competetions, etc. Three years ago, we were printing thumbnails of the images we took, where parents could view them, and place an order on paper of what they wanted. Now, due to LTSP, we have viewing stations. Most weekends we deploy between 12 and 18, depending on the size of the event -- but we have, and have the ability to operate 30 at any one given event. We've done events where all 30 were in use at one time, and everything works perfectly. We have a custom-written web-based application which handles everything for us. We dump the photos into directories, Imagemagick comes in and makes all of the thumbnails for the parents to view. The thin clients run IceWM with Firefox in a customized/trimmed-down full-screen mode, which automatically boots up in that mode, with the application as the home page. Parents can then view the photos right there, on the screen, add images to their shopping cart, and complete the checkout process. We initially looked into Wyse thin clients, using a Windows-based server setup. The cost was going to astronomical, in licensing fees, compared to what we ended up paying using Linux and LTSP. Our server runs Slackware, which we did go ahead and purchase to support Patrick. The server, which I built, is a dual opteron setup with 2gig of ram. It handles everything we can imagine it needing to do. Alright, I've gotten a bit off-topic here, but thanks to LTSP and Slackware/Linux, we're kickin. :) ~~Aryq~~

Worked great with Unix

[hazem]

I used to work at a school as a sysadmin where a vast majority of the machines were Tektronix X-terminals. We had Sun Sparcs and linux boxes on the back-end running FVWM.

From an admin point of view, it couldn't be beat. They rarely had problems. When they did, it was usually because paper got sucked up underneath and blocked the air intake. But even when there were problems, you just swapped out the pizza-box. And talk about quiet.

We only had one die - someone spilled cuppa-soup next to it and it got sucked up inside. Yuck.

This approach is great any any environment where you want consistent software settings, etc. We had 2 application servers. Want to install/upgrade applications? Just put them in 2 places, and everyone has it.

We also had a few "power" machines with the heavy duty-aps. Just SSH over, point your terminal to your screen (a script handled this by default), and you had all the power you need.

I had a lot of lazy days back then. Then we started turning them all into windows boxes... and I had a lot more work. It was sad.

I would hope that windows via thin-client would be as nice as it was with unix... but it sounds like the costs are just as bad.

Good luck.

Re:Yes, but not anymore

[online-shopper]

You could also look at using LTSP as a way to bootstrap thin clients to talk to a Windows server. you still have to deal with half of the MS licensing stupidity. Though you might consider using LTSP to hook up to a linux server. The project has seen moderate success in a variety of situations.

Give PXES a try

[Lisandro]

It's not a Windows solution, but PXES is an incredible linux-based thin client solution. It's used in my workplace and we never had an issue with it. You can pretty much recycle any old computer you have laying arround, create a bootdisk and off you go.

    Just make sure the server machine has enough memory, and it just works. No hassles.