Ellison to Push Linux NCs

This has been done way too often by Otto · 1999-10-07 21:31 · Score: 2

I recall when I first went to college. They had hundreds of computers all over the place (mostly Pentiums), and not a single one had a hard drive. They booted from a network server, mapped all the drives out, and ran just fine, all through the network. Admittedly, they used a bunch of custom software, and MS-DOS 5-6, but I'm sure it wouldn't be hard to do something like that with Linux. But it'd be just as pointless.

You see, about 2 years later they started scrapping that whole idea, because the fact was you couldn't get any actual work done that was useful. You could run Windows or XWindows if you really wanted, but the network traffic got so unbearable that usually, you didn't bother. They became e-mail checking machines and that was about it.

Storage is cheap, administration can just as easily be done by some good scripting. No need to waste your bandwidth by an obscene amount.

The NC is dead, man. Rest in peace.

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NCs *are* a good solution.... by sparks · 1999-10-07 16:03 · Score: 3

...but we all know that being technically good doesn't necessarily mean something will be a technical success, especially in the convention-bound world of corporate IT.

I am sitting in the computer support office of a company which puts NT boxes on people's desks. These boxes are used for the usual suspects - Word, Excel, Powerpoint - but also for running Reflection to connect to a big old UNIX box which runs the core business application. I look after the UNIX box, which just runs and runs, which is how I have enough time to post on Slashdot.

The Windows support people around me have a hard time. They are constantly running around installing and upgrading software on people's PCs[1]. Either that or fixing the problems people bring on themselves by changing settings or switching off their machine while the drive is writing. 90% of the problems I have are with users changing their Reflection settings so they can't connect to the UNIX box, rather than with the UNIX box itself - I'd hardly have anything to do at all if they were given dumb terminals instead of Windows boxes to connect with.

It seems to me that in this kind of environment, NCs would make a lot of sense. No local data storage. No local configuration to be mucked about with by users. All the advantages in terms of reliability and manageability of dumb terminals, but with plenty of local processing power. So the data stays where it belongs - in the center - but the processing is with the user.

Just think what a difference it would make in here. Software upgrades? Just do it once. Users screw up their configuration? Well, they can't.

Not that it is ever likely to happen. Oh well. Life as usual.

[1] Yes, I know with NT you can go a long way towards centralised applications and protecting the workstation from the actions of the local user. In fact, I believe that this has been done on this network as completely as it is possible to do so. And users still screw up their PCs. And techies still have to go around to do upgrades - to make sure those precious DLLs are in C:/WINNT or whatever.

Re:NCs *are* a good solution.... by Adrian+Harvey · 1999-10-07 17:11 · Score: 2

Sounds like you really need a workstation administration system like ZENWorks (Novell) or SMS (Micros~1).
disclaimer: I can't speak for SMS but I presume it provides a reasonably similar feature set to ZEN.

With ZEN (2.0), I can package up new applications, or service packs, or even O/S upgrades, and deploy them automatically, even whilst the workstation is unattended. With NT workstations it can perform the installs as administrator so that you can lock down normal users. It can automaically repair some forms of "damaged" apps (such as when win9x users delete DLLs. It also allows you to apply policies (both the MS ones, and others) to lock down the PCs, and applies them much more reliably than MS policy files (they are stored in NDS) Coupled with Ghost which lets you deploy a standard image quickly, or a small stock of swap-out PCs, you can have any sort of damage fixed very quickly.

If you run a Novell Network, go download a copy of ZENWorks (the starter pack is free, and has *most* of the features.) It's most useful if you deploy a new SOE (Standard Operating Environment - OS and Apps) where you can lock everything down, but can reduce headaches even in existing environments. Standard desktop managment doesn't even run any server side components! (not counting NDS)

I have serviced and worked on NC based networks too, and have found that, in general, they are as much, if not more, work than a well-designed, locked down PC based network.

What took you so long, Mr Ellison? by Paul+Crowley · 1999-10-07 17:05 · Score: 2

The thing I want to know is, why did Ellison wait so long before announcing this? He seems keen to use Linux to attack Microsoft's dominance, and this is the obvious way to do it, so why didn't he announce such a project months ago?
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NCs have no real future by Adrian+Harvey · 1999-10-07 16:22 · Score: 2

Note: There seem to be two things called NCs
-A- The "Reincarnated X-Terminal" Type
Such as the NCD explora (alright, they *can* run some local apps, but they mostly don't)
-B- The "Reincarnated diskless workstation" Type
Such as the Sun Javastation

I couldn't be *certain* which were being talked about here, so I have tried to address both. Please bear in mind that some of the below points don't apply in both cases however.
My thoughts are as follows
1. Price
- Non-standardness Raises the price
- The price gets kept down only by removing essential functionality.
- PC prices get reduced to match NC price gains.
- Type As require hefty servers which are expensive and depreciate quickly.
2. Administration
- NCs usually introduce a new, and different way to administer the Applications on them.
- By the release of the NCs, PC software had cought up with any new ideas in it. I suspect this will be repeated in the next round.
3. Speed
- Transferring all your programs and data across the wire always winds up slower than reading them off a local disk. Much better to pre-transfer them to local storage, and load from there.
- Type As are terrible for any multimedia application. And too many standard applications have multimediaish bits in them.
3. Maintainence
- PCs are easy to replace. Changing brands may be difficult if the environment is really tied down, but being locked into some propritery technology is worse. (this applies more to type Bs)
- Networked PCs can work in some sort of limited "stand-alone" mode if the network dies.

The concept of NCs has been useful, however. It has forced software vendors into creating products that make WinTel PCs less of a nightmare to administer. I use Novell's ZENWorks a lot, and it can be used to provide "NC-like" administrability (have I just made a new word? :-) ) with PCs

Another Idea PCs might usefully steal now is to make a machine at a lower price by only having iMac type expandability. Most corporations and govt. depts don't care about expandability for most of their PCs.

So, I guess although I think NCs will die, their useful components will be merged into PCs.

Swapping through ethernet/modem? by Skinka · 1999-10-07 16:28 · Score: 2

This are ment to be very low-cost solutions, so they probably won't have too much RAM. X + Netscape is real memory hog, and users will definetly be runnig more than just that. So what do you do when you run out of memory? Since these things don't have a hard drive, swapping is not an option. "Error - not enough memory to run application."? yuck.

The NC is already here. by Colin+Smith · 1999-10-07 17:31 · Score: 3

The NC is already here and it has absolutely nothing to do with Oracle or Linux or Windows or the "NC platform" etc etc etc etc.

It is ANY system with a web browser. The web browser is the "new universal interface" in the same way telnet still is.

Build/modify your applications to be web enabled and you have a NC available application. And I don't just mean Java here (PHP, CGI, ASP etc).

This announcement is completely irrelevant and about as near to useless as you get these days from the big boys.

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Re:The NC is already here. by Tet · 1999-10-07 18:02 · Score: 3

The web browser is the "new universal interface" in the same way telnet still is.
Nope. It's a universal interface for simple applications. Anything that requires conditional processing is out unless you go the Java route, and given how slow/flaky the JVMs in most browsers are, that's probably not a good plan. JavaScript and DHTML help to some extent, but they don't go far enough. Try changing the entries in a form menu based on an earlier action in anything other than Java. PHP can do it, but only with a page reload which is unacceptable for performance reasons. I'd love to do a web font end for my current application (which is written in Tcl at the moment), but it's too complex to do without using Java (which we're not allowed to use anyway, because we don't have enough Java expertise on site to support the applicaiton).

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A question... by platypus · 1999-10-07 17:32 · Score: 3

Could anybody with more insight please explain to me (and probably to others, too) what _fundamental_technical_ obstacles exist which prevent you from building a nc-server network with one big and several small standart pc's and your favorite linux distribution?
I mean Xfree, nfs/code etc, nis/kerberos, telnet/ssh. Not every package mentioned is perfect, but I want to know about fundamental problems. Isn't - in this context - the "network computer" just a buzzword? Take a large ramdisk and boot over the network using something as nilo..
Or don't use the all or nothing approach and use a local harddisc + apps over network.

Re:A question... by ed_the_unready · 1999-10-07 18:29 · Score: 2

You're correct that any average Unix/Linux system is well equipped to offer the major benefits of Network Computing. I see NC's as a way to overcome the maintenance and logistical mess that networking traditional DOS/Windows/OS2 involves, primarily from their single-user software architecture.
In my wired home, I practice the NC-esque "Monster-in-the-Closet" approach, where nearly all computer resources (and thus expenses) are concentrated in one master server, while the rest of the network are little more that SSH and/or X clients. Even an old and very feeble notebook of mine runs DOS and Kermit's Telnet client.
In such an environment, NFS is unnecessary and in fact becomes a maintenance and security burden. My example lab is too small to gain much from NIS, but a larger network would implement either NIS or some means of sharing relevant configuration data. Kerberos, done right (dedicated server, etc), can be useful for environments large enough to justify its requirements, but keep in mind that it requires client side support, which means custom versions of commercial software or custom compiles of Open Source packages. Much of Kerberos' functionality is available through SSH, anyway.
In a larger environment, I would implement multiple server-class systems for performance reasons, using either failover or individual servers dedicated to certain functions, with mirroring between them.
In short, the main benefits of NC architecture are available to the standard Unix and Linux system. NC's have been deprived of success in the market largely for 2 reasons: first, their market (DOS/Windows/OS2) can't grasp how a centralized network is *more* reliable that their current situation, second was the way NC's were prematurely associated with Java and Web browsers, neither of which were ready to serve up the goods at the time that the NC idea was first being promoted.
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NCs are even better for... by kurowski · 1999-10-07 17:36 · Score: 2

Even if people can't agree that NCs are a Good Thing in cubicle land, I would love to see them in

classrooms
hotel rooms
public places like airports, freeway rest stops, etc
public labs in libraries
and so on...

basically, wherever you don't have a one-to-one relationship between users and computers, NCs are a no brainer. when there is that 1-1, then i guess it's a matter of religious conviction: were ya raised on a single-user OS or a multi-user OS?

Re:NCs are even better for... by Baki · 1999-10-07 18:22 · Score: 2

I worked at a firm that gives UNIX courses. Off course we used X-terminals (NC's avant la lettre).

This was perfect, no maintenance whatsoever, they
always work, and the students were always amazed when I told them after a few hours that they had been editing and compiling programs with 10 people on a single pentium computer.

Apart from that: I've always worked in UNIX environments. Yes, we have NT computers now, but 95% of the time they're running an X-window server in full screen mode, giving you the idea (and convenience) that you're working on the UNIX servers via an X-terminal. I find that NC's (X-terminals) are perfect also for cubicle land.

My previous job there were 500 developers working on a few UNIX servers, all through X-terminals. There was 1, just 1 system administrator for the whole lot. I guess that a PC network for that many people and a couple of servers needs many many more system administrators.

We've had the NC before and chucked it by aUser · 1999-10-07 23:32 · Score: 2

Does anyone feel like going to the lords of server admin and dba and beg them to install that one extra application that would save you weeks and weeks of stupid typing work, or extract that one query-result from the database that you really need?

No? Well get your own PC and start doing your own thing, and make sure to network it, so that you can still collaborate with the rest of the organisation.

Some people really think that users abandoned the mainframe in large numbers, just because it had dumb text-based terminals. Wrong. As a matter of fact, they left the mainframe, at the time, for a system that was text-based too (msdos). What really matters, is that the users rather help themselves, than be at the mercy of the autocratic, self-serving lords of the central system.

Since the nc brings back the situation that users desperately wanted to leave, it will continue to fail miserably.

Any company that installs NCs, will see PCs popping up all over. And users will have 2 monitors on their desktop, one for the NC and one for the PC; and in the end all the real data will reside in the PC, and the NC will just be decoration. A bit later, some smart company will come up with PC-based terminal emulation for the NC-server and the NC will disappear completely. Bye bye.

Since we've been through all that, I can only see totally brainless managers trying this again...

NC's have their good sides, and their bad sides. by arcade · 1999-10-07 19:41 · Score: 2

I don't know how many times I've heard that NC's are "the big thing" the last 8 years. But - instead of taking of - terminals has dissapeared more and more. PC's and workstations are replacing them.

Why does this happen? Well, as far as I can tell, there are several reason. One - the most obvious - being that people want the same system that they've got at home. They want to be able to install programs. They want to be able to set the system up to their preferences. The problem with this is of course managing computers with individual setups.

Also, there is a privacy issue. You cannot possibly belive that the workers use all the time *working*. They surf the web, they write personal letters, and so on. Furthermore -- they don't want this to be stored on a central server. They want it to be stored on "their" computer.

Another thingie. With one central server, the companys work is much more vulnerable - if an evilminded cracker breaks system integrity. Don't think "backups!!". If a cracker really want to be bad, he trojans the backupsoftware, and let several weeks pass, before he erases everything. The result? Several weeks worth of work lost. If workers store their work at individual machines, everything won't be lost at the same time. (But, it is a much greater chance of machines getting cracked from time to time).

Finally - I think the NC have a future at the workplace. it's much more easy to configure / maintain for the administrator. But - only in workplaces where the workers know unix. I don't think the NT users are 'ready' for this. They want everything to be the same way as 'at home'.

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NC is the same idea over again. by Above · 1999-10-08 06:07 · Score: 2

Network Computers duplicate ideas that have been pushed over and over again in the networked world. First there was the dumb terminal, then there was the X-Termal. These days there is the web / java terminal. They are all some form of network computer. When you get right down to it there is a "right tool for the job" problem. If there is something that is cost effective and gives you the applications you need, use it, by all means. Linux boxes running X, go for it. PC's runing an X server, go for it. Mac's running native applications, go for it. Mainframes with dumb terminals, go for it. The test of a technology is that the system administrators _AND_ the users are able to easily complete their jobs. If you have a system that is easy to manage, and easy to use, you have a winner. Those who are truely techologically clueful will be able to use any system. Those who are not will need something that makes the particular thing they need a computer to do easy, and each platform has their own strengths in that area.

Year of the NC by fuerstma · 1999-10-07 20:05 · Score: 3

Let's look back at "Oracle" Ellison's predictions, in chronological order:

1994 - "Oracle chief Larry Ellison proclaims 1994 to be the year of the Network Computer" - PC Week

1995 - "Oracle chief Larry Ellison proclaims 1995 to be the year of the Network Computer" - PC Magazine

1996 - "Oracle chief Larry Ellison proclaims 1996 to be the year of the Network Computer" - Network Computing

1997 - "Oracle chief Larry Ellison proclaims 1997 to be the year of the Network Computer" - Thin Client Today

1998 - "Oracle chief Larry Ellison proclaims 1998 to be the year of the Network Computer" - Farmers Journal Quarterly

1999 - "Oracle chief Larry Ellison proclaims 1999 to be the year of the Network Computer" - Linux Journal

I hope Slashdot doesn't become another magazine to fall into this moronic trap of falling for every Oracle press release. Overall, prophet Ellison has proved himself a little short on vision.

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Re:NC's have their good sides, and their bad sides by bmetzler · 1999-10-07 20:16 · Score: 2

One - the most obvious - being that people want the same system that they've got at home.

Maybe, but I doubt it. I don't know many people who want to replace their NT box at work with 98 because that's what they have at home.

They want to be able to install programs.

This is absolutely the Number 1 thing you don't want users to be able to do.

They want to be able to set the system up to their preferences.

I don't see any reason NC's prevent this. I certainly am able to configure my own themes and desktop layout under X.

Also, there is a privacy issue. You cannot possibly belive that the workers use all the time *working*.

Having your files on your own box doesn't help. Unless you have permissions on the file system. But the server allows you to set file permissions too, so I don't see what the difference would be.

If workers store their work at individual machines, everything won't be lost at the same time.

Storing your work on your own PC may be fine for a very small company ( less then 15 employees). But in that case, NC's probably wouldn't be a viable solution. Show me any large company that would keep employee's work on their local hard drives? The idea is preposterous.

-Brent
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