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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."
Yes, LTSP has been around for more than 10 years now and is really about making all that easier. It lets the user choose if he wants to connect to a Windows server using RDP or to a Linux box either using X11 over SSH or just using ssh for authentication and X11 clear on the network for better performance. The main addition is having a login manager for that which can call a lot of hooks, mount the home directory directly on the thin client and then mix local and remote applications.
Yeah, you can do it without LTSP. But you don't have to be a guru to stand up an LTSP server and host desktops for thin clients so it's handy for the schools who use it. I've been using it at home for years to host desktops for guests because when the nieces and nephews come over they have incredible computer corrupting skills and need a platform that's less amenable to viruses than my kids' desktops and laptops.
You can also mangle the config to merge in DRBL, which allows me to netboot compute cluster nodes that I get at surplus if I want to do a little recreational number crunching or transcoding. I think it's pretty cool that we live in an age when an ordinary elementary school can have its own supercomputer and if their networking is up to snuff, join the ranks of the world's most powerful supercomputers.
But go ahead and rain on their parade if it makes you feel 1337.
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But do you have sound working? Can you plug in a usb drive on your client and see it on your desktop? Yes you can do all that, but you also need to manage it, and LTSP supports installations of as large as 30,000 desktop clients.
The point is to have a thin client work like a desktop.When it works it is a huge time saver for admins, as you have one server cluster to back up and maintain, and a bunch of diskless workstations that can be unplugged and replaced with no configuration or installation beyond maybe needing to put the mac address in dhcpd.conf
LTSP is probably more work than it's worth if you have less than five work stations, but more than five workstations, and the long term savings probably make it worth the initial time investment, as you need beefy servers and good redundancies, but after you have a high availability server cluster that people are logging into, management as become a lot easier.
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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.
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You don't do exactly what the project says it does. The project uses diskless system with no ROM OS to boot to a full X session or RDP session. Jim McQuillan basically wrote a system to duplicte what he was doing for hospitals at the time. When I used LTSP often (from 0.9 to 4.0, circa 2000-2004), the process worked like this:
I'd also like to give a big shout out to Eric Harrison, who made the whole system easy to use for schools with K12LTSP (now K12Linux).
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Sorry, but it's you that doesn't know what he's talking about, since you're too "time share" phobic to find out what's really going on.
Give me an enterprise-class machine (disk access, etc., though two machines would be better) of he same caliber as a high-end desktop from today, and I can run 15-20 cheap diskless clients off of it in a Gbit, switched environment, with the same performance of a low-end desktop from today. 3D accelleration. All the desktop apps. Local storage and printer access. How does that work? The performance comes from shared application libraries among different clients and cached memory on the server.
Yeah, I've done this in production environment. I've done it in my business. I'm not a jobless troll. It works. It saves a ton of money. Users have no idea anything's different than a standard desktop, except that booting is five times faster, and when hardware fails, I can rip a client out, put a new one in, and have the client back up and running in 5 minutes. I fix the broken client on my schedule instead of holding up work for it.
Stop being afraid and learn some new tech.
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