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After 2 Years of Development, LTSP 5.2 Is Out
The Linux Terminal Server Project has for years been simplifying the task of time-sharing a Linux system by means of X terminals (including repurposed low-end PCs). Now, stgraber writes "After almost two years or work and 994 commits later made by only 14 contributors, the LTSP team is proud to announce that the Linux Terminal Server Project released LTSP 5.2 on Wednesday the 17th of February. As the LTSP team wanted this release to be some kind of a reference point in LTSP's history, LDM (LTSP Display Manager) 2.1 and LTSPfs 0.6 were released on the same day. Packages for LTSP 5.2, LDM 2.1 and LTSPfs 0.6 are already in Ubuntu Lucid and a backport for Karmic is available. For other distributions, packages should be available very soon. And the upstream code is, as always, available on Launchpad."
A browser and a VT-100 terminal are all that a lot of customer service people need and should have. The limitation of using a web application prevents a lot of activity you don't want customer service people doing like installing applications, running scripts embedded in documents, etc. Web interfaces have come a long way.
Likewise networking and thin clients have come a long way since the days of Token Ring, which peaked at 100mbps in the late 1990s. Thin clients have gigabit network connections now and every port is switched rather than being part of a bus or loop.
Most especially servers have come a long way. It's not unusual to have a 1U server that runs 16 3GHz threads on 8 cores, or 12 threads on 12 cores, using high-bandwidth/high IOPs SAN or local storage and 10Gbps networking. Back then 1GHz was fast for a server. 1GB was a lot of RAM, and today 192GB is easily reachable. Next month we get the 12-core 2, 4 and 8 socket boxes for up to 96 cores per server. This is just the commodity stuff - I'm not citing the special purpose stuff like Sun and Itanic for the obvious reasons. Heck, these days the SSD hard drive in my laptop can do over 8K IOPs - I can configure a server to do well over a million. Storage infrastructure also enjoys the leverage of newer technologies that leverage abstraction in new ways. You can, for example, create "smart clones" of a desktop virtual machine which work as deltas off of a "standard image" and require almost no storage at all. As the user uses it, the smartclone image file on the SAN grows only as much as the data written. As soon as the customer logs out, their temporary data is erased and no storage is consumed - and they get a fresh image the next time they log in which improves security immensely.
So in short, time sharing was bad back then because you were sharing from a very shallow pool of resources through a thin straw. Now the pool is deeper enough, the straw is wide enough, to give the benefits we were promised back then and didn't see. The clients, the network and the servers all have the capacity to deliver an outstanding experience. Sharing is an even better idea now because the drives, servers and even individual processors or cores can power themselves down and up based on demand and keep a reasonable amount of resources available to handle demand spikes.
The question now becomes whether or not we can return to the cathedral - the ivory tower of precious resources husbanded and defended by a heirarchical information clergy steeped in knowledge and cloaked in the mysteries of keeping it running and making it safe. We needed the Bazaar to improve productivity when the infrastructure wasn't up to snuff, but it's proven a costly and vulnerable environment for business. Getting the end users to give up their local autonomy is not going to be a soft sell - it's going to be a long and ugly fight. IT pros can probably ease the transition by making the virtual or shared environment more open and faster than the local one until the transition is complete, and then shutting down the ability of end users to do unsafe things once the migration is complete.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
And that's why we implemented localapps. Running firefox as a localapp will let you do fullscreen flash just fine. As I mentioned, LTSP is either using X11 over SSH or SSH only for authentication. In the second mode, your credentials are sent securely but the actual X11 events are send unencrypted, so that's actually faster than any OpenVPN/IPSEC you may use.