This is a common problem with both NT4.0 Terminal Servers and Terminal Services under Win2K. Many applications, often written for the desktop, just don't play well in a multi-user environment like this.
There are a lot of methods to calm down CPU-hogging apps. Some can be tamed by registry settings, others by utilities (like Tame), and others by server tuning apps like TScale, made by RTO Software.
All of these things are discussed on TheThin.Net website (and the associated mailing list), considered by many to be the best source of freely-available thin client computing info on the 'net. I suggest you check it out, and read the FAQs and archives.
"The challenge is, who is going to buy it?" Eunice said. "There is so much pricing pressure and competition in the market. The reality is that Apple will have a hard time going to financial communities or telcos with this product."
Apple gives you an UNLIMITED client license - how can the article offer this as a serious concern when licensing cost is such a big concern, especially for Micrsoft houses?
No, I understand that fine. I'm saying that the network will *not* significantly decline. Existing "good" files won't be overwritten by bad ones; and bad files have always been a problem to some extent. People deal.
On the other hand, poisoning the habitat of a fish has a direct and immediate effect; fish that get bad food DIE. That's why I said it was a flawed analogy.
I hope their professors pointed this out...it's one thing to poison the habitat of a creature to kill it off. There's a very real consequence to this - the creature dies. With P2P networks, nobody dies, they look for another copy of the file to download. Not rocket science. Not even really a deterrent.
P2P networks have always had a certain percentage of bogus files. People wanting to be the first to upload the newest shooter, the newest album, the newest app sometimes make a bogus image and upload it. Sometimes people make crappy rips of songs, and don't bother to check them. Big deal. People who obtain files in this fashion usually know ahead of time that the file might not be what it says it is, or might be a bad quality rip, or whatever. They delete it if it's bad, and move on.
The other thing P2P networks have going for them is perserverence on the part of the user. People who want to get stuff for FREE will put up with a couple of false downloads. Dead fish can't do that...;)
-Jeff
Re:Why is this an unusual occurrence?
on
Forbes on Linux
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
That's a pretty interesting point. I work for one of many IT groups inside a major financial company, supporting mostly NT servers. About 90% of the applications we run here in-house are custom built.
They don't rely on outside vendors for supporting software and creating patches; the entire process takes place internally. This would seem to be the ideal situation for application development on Linux...
Obviously the learning curve for developers used to MS developing environments has to be considered, but next to the potential cost savings of migrating hundreds of servers off of a (relatively) expensive OS to one that is (relatively) free, one could make a pretty good argument that the time and money spent on training for the dev guys would be well spent.
I wonder if any of the developers have thought about that. Pardon me, I think I need to go drop a clue on someone.
Thin-client technology in the Windows world is getting pretty robust these days, between Microsoft's Terminal Services, Citrix Metaframe and competitiors like Tarantella and New Moon's Canaveral.
Also, Citrix Metaframe for Unix allows you to run Unix apps remotely using the ICA protocol, which is a bit "thinner" than X11.
So using one of the products above, a several of which have clients for PocketPC, you can run Windows or Unix apps. No sweat. To take it one step further, you can serve up the apps to the thin-client server using something like Softricity's SoftGrid which "virtualizes" the applications - they run in a little OS "bubble" so you don't actually have to install them on your app server - so you won't have old crappy legacy apps stomping on eachother when you run them on the same box.
I hope this company has a few more tricks, because I don't see anything new or special in their products.
A problem you're likely to encounter (and may have already considered) is the fact that a the resources you require to do work in a distributed environment will not necessarily be representative of the resources you will need in a centralized environment.
A good multi-user system will be efficient in handling system resources, sharing CPU cycles, managing RAM and sharing when possible (using copy-on-write, etc), and all these things are unneccesary in single-user systems.
Probably the best bet is to come up with vague numbers for systems in different departments (developers need X amount of processing power, Y amount of RAM, while marketing needs X/100 CPU and Y/50 RAM, for example) and then find a company that's already done this kind of migration - perhaps through your solutions vendor - and see how their numbers for disctributed systems matched up with hardware for the centralized system.
Of course I read the article. And I was plenty familiar with Moore's Law (or axiom, or theory, whatever) before I read that article.
I also know it's approximate. But when you're talking about doubling every 18 months or so, that 5 years gets pretty significant. If you reach 1000 times at 15 years, you get an 8000 times increase by 19.5 years. Big difference.
You can keep poking at me if you want, but it's getting old...
But Citrix , with MS Terminal Services, provides the technology to make this a resonable goal. It's not cost-effective for one user, but if you're a business and you want to provide this to a group of users, it's a good solution.
Using NFuse (Citrix's web portal solution, free if you already own Citrix Metaframe) and their "web clients", you can connect to apps, or a "desktop in a window" from just about any type of client - Windows, Mac, Unix, and CE to some extent. You can do a lot of this with just Windows Terminal Services, but Citrix adds the non-MS client support and a lot of better features. I'm sure there are some ASPs out there somewhere providing what you need using Citrix. A lot of them died a horrible death though.
Standard disclaimer - I don't work for Citrix, but I use their stuff a lot.
Forgive me if my math is off, but if Moore's law states that processing power roughly doubles every 18 months, wouldn't a 1000-fold increase occur in about 15 years?
Maybe they're designing the next generation Playstation on a Pentium machine. Did they ever fix that bug?
The article (on Gamespy) was overly optimistic. This type of technology works fairly well in fast a LAN environment (maybe an internet cafe that caters to gamers) but over home broadband, it's just not where it needs to be for content-heavy games. Loading faster than a CD? I'm seriously doubtful, since I've worked for companies delivering similar services.
Companies like Exent with their Games on Demand type solution and Softricity with their application on demand stuff have come a long way, by making local caches secure to thwart pirates, and by utilizing algorithms to anticipate what parts of the code you will need next, reducing the wait when a new code chunk needs to be downloaded. But the fact remains that at this point, if you have a dedicated line (DSL) your bandwidth probably isn't much higher than 640K, and if you're on cable, who knows what you're really getting when your neighbor is downloading bootleg porno for his collection.
Diablo-style games that generate dungeons on demand can suffer from serious lag because all of the code, at one point or another, has to get pulled across the wire. And when you're surrounded by 500 orcs trying to hack your way to freedom, do you really want the game to get choppy and unresponsive? Racing games that load everything and then just run from memory work much better, but you still wait. The idea is sound, but games are just too bloated for the average guy's broadband pipe. Maybe in a year or five, if access gets faster and cheaper.
The biggest offender for me? Resume bots. I post my resume to see if people are hiring, and I get 12 messages a day from OTHER resume posting sites trying to get me to go there and post again.
If they're smart enough to grab my email addy, why can't they harvest my resume too and leave me alone?
In the article, a fan of the technology mentions that the machine is only scanning what's on the front of the license. This may be true, but depending on where you live, that can be a lot more info than you want people tracking.
In the state of Massachusetts, unless you request otherwise, your license number is your social security number. Granted, license records are public, so if you want, you can get the info anyway, but it seems that allowing someone to scan your license and get not only your physical info, but also your SSN is not very smart.
That brings us to the question of who is going to be responsible for the data - if a restaraunt isn't careful with their database and an unscrupulous employee snags it, they now have hundreds of records with names, addresses, height, weight, and SSNs. There's all kinds of mischief they could wreak with that kind of info. In these days of rampant credit card fraud and identity theft, you'd think people would think things through a little better.
Lastly, what about lawsuits? Could I sue a bar that, without my explicit permission, scanned my card and recorded all the data? If a business was busily copying down all the info on the front of my license, I would certainly object. If I didn't know they were doing it, I would have no chance to...
A year or two ago I got a refurbed generation 1 2G Jaz drive from PCConnection for about $130 (yeah, I know, the folly of buying a drive that crapped out on someone else...). But it was replacing a drive that had died on me the year before, leaving me with about 20GB of useless cartridges that cost about $100 apiece. Anyway, the drive showed up in the mail and didn't work. PCConnection made me deal with Iomega directly.
Iomega was actually quite helpful as long as I put up with all of the handholding and troubleshooting steps they read of their scripts before telling them what the problem was. They sent me a replacement - another refurbed drive. If worked - for 3 days, then died. I also found out that the first drive munged one of my carts. Another call, they sent me another drive. This one worked for a week and then died. I now had 2 bad carts (killed by their drives) and I had gone through three refurbed drives. I tried to remain calm, explaining how it was not acceptable for them to keep eating my carts by sending me defective drives.
The told me they could not offer any data recovery services, and that I used the old carts at my own risk. However, to make up for my trouble, they sent me a brand new drive and brand new carts to replace the ones that got eaten.
Not an ideal situation, but to their credit, they did make a decent attempt to do right by me, and for my $130 and a bit of hassle, I got myself a $300 drive and another $300 worth of new carts. This was a pretty good experience compared to the horror stories of Iomega customer service back in the early days of Zip disks.
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 consider myself experienced enough in Citrix to offer an opposing viewpoint here. I have set up perhaps 10 different server farms for different companies, ranging from single-server installs up to a farm of 60 servers.
Good planning and good testing (a necessity for any new server deployment) is all that's needed to get a stable and easy to manage Citrix environment.
Nobody should be running a single server Citrix environment anyway - you'd have to be nuts to run your whole user base on one box. Use Citrix load balancing (or DNS round robin, for that matter) and split your load. If you lose a box, the users get kicked, sure, but they can reconnect immediately to one of your other servers and keep working.
Someone else posted that they use quad xeon boxes with 2 GB RAM and 80GB of disk space - this is folly. IF you spend the same money on a pair of dual proc boxes, you get better performance and redundancy. Why all the disk space? You should only need space for the apps to be installed - all user data should be on a separate file server that gets backed up nightly. That way, if you lose a Citrix box, the user can still get their files...
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This is a common problem with both NT4.0 Terminal Servers and Terminal Services under Win2K. Many applications, often written for the desktop, just don't play well in a multi-user environment like this.
There are a lot of methods to calm down CPU-hogging apps. Some can be tamed by registry settings, others by utilities (like Tame), and others by server tuning apps like TScale, made by RTO Software.
All of these things are discussed on TheThin.Net website (and the associated mailing list), considered by many to be the best source of freely-available thin client computing info on the 'net. I suggest you check it out, and read the FAQs and archives.
-Jeff Gunn
Well, for starters, read about these poor souls who got stranded over there. I don't think they've managed to get home yet...
They have a pretty extensive journal, I suggest starting at the beginning.
-Jeff
My ISP (and most others, I believe) look down upon their customers employing port scanners and other snoopnig devices over their lines.
;)
Maybe we should talk to their ISP and have their accounts revoked.
Jeff
At the end of the article, it says:
"The challenge is, who is going to buy it?" Eunice said. "There is so much pricing pressure and competition in the market. The reality is that Apple will have a hard time going to financial communities or telcos with this product."
Apple gives you an UNLIMITED client license - how can the article offer this as a serious concern when licensing cost is such a big concern, especially for Micrsoft houses?
No, I understand that fine. I'm saying that the network will *not* significantly decline. Existing "good" files won't be overwritten by bad ones; and bad files have always been a problem to some extent. People deal.
On the other hand, poisoning the habitat of a fish has a direct and immediate effect; fish that get bad food DIE. That's why I said it was a flawed analogy.
I hope their professors pointed this out...it's one thing to poison the habitat of a creature to kill it off. There's a very real consequence to this - the creature dies. With P2P networks, nobody dies, they look for another copy of the file to download. Not rocket science. Not even really a deterrent.
P2P networks have always had a certain percentage of bogus files. People wanting to be the first to upload the newest shooter, the newest album, the newest app sometimes make a bogus image and upload it. Sometimes people make crappy rips of songs, and don't bother to check them. Big deal. People who obtain files in this fashion usually know ahead of time that the file might not be what it says it is, or might be a bad quality rip, or whatever. They delete it if it's bad, and move on.
The other thing P2P networks have going for them is perserverence on the part of the user. People who want to get stuff for FREE will put up with a couple of false downloads. Dead fish can't do that...;)
-Jeff
That's a pretty interesting point. I work for one of many IT groups inside a major financial company, supporting mostly NT servers. About 90% of the applications we run here in-house are custom built.
They don't rely on outside vendors for supporting software and creating patches; the entire process takes place internally. This would seem to be the ideal situation for application development on Linux...
Obviously the learning curve for developers used to MS developing environments has to be considered, but next to the potential cost savings of migrating hundreds of servers off of a (relatively) expensive OS to one that is (relatively) free, one could make a pretty good argument that the time and money spent on training for the dev guys would be well spent.
I wonder if any of the developers have thought about that. Pardon me, I think I need to go drop a clue on someone.
-Jeff
Thin-client technology in the Windows world is getting pretty robust these days, between Microsoft's Terminal Services, Citrix Metaframe and competitiors like Tarantella and New Moon's Canaveral.
Also, Citrix Metaframe for Unix allows you to run Unix apps remotely using the ICA protocol, which is a bit "thinner" than X11.
So using one of the products above, a several of which have clients for PocketPC, you can run Windows or Unix apps. No sweat. To take it one step further, you can serve up the apps to the thin-client server using something like Softricity's SoftGrid which "virtualizes" the applications - they run in a little OS "bubble" so you don't actually have to install them on your app server - so you won't have old crappy legacy apps stomping on eachother when you run them on the same box.
I hope this company has a few more tricks, because I don't see anything new or special in their products.
-Jeff
A problem you're likely to encounter (and may have already considered) is the fact that a the resources you require to do work in a distributed environment will not necessarily be representative of the resources you will need in a centralized environment.
A good multi-user system will be efficient in handling system resources, sharing CPU cycles, managing RAM and sharing when possible (using copy-on-write, etc), and all these things are unneccesary in single-user systems.
Probably the best bet is to come up with vague numbers for systems in different departments (developers need X amount of processing power, Y amount of RAM, while marketing needs X/100 CPU and Y/50 RAM, for example) and then find a company that's already done this kind of migration - perhaps through your solutions vendor - and see how their numbers for disctributed systems matched up with hardware for the centralized system.
Hope that helps,
-Jeff
Of course I read the article. And I was plenty familiar with Moore's Law (or axiom, or theory, whatever) before I read that article.
I also know it's approximate. But when you're talking about doubling every 18 months or so, that 5 years gets pretty significant. If you reach 1000 times at 15 years, you get an 8000 times increase by 19.5 years. Big difference.
You can keep poking at me if you want, but it's getting old...
-Jeff
But Citrix , with MS Terminal Services, provides the technology to make this a resonable goal. It's not cost-effective for one user, but if you're a business and you want to provide this to a group of users, it's a good solution.
Using NFuse (Citrix's web portal solution, free if you already own Citrix Metaframe) and their "web clients", you can connect to apps, or a "desktop in a window" from just about any type of client - Windows, Mac, Unix, and CE to some extent. You can do a lot of this with just Windows Terminal Services, but Citrix adds the non-MS client support and a lot of better features. I'm sure there are some ASPs out there somewhere providing what you need using Citrix. A lot of them died a horrible death though.
Standard disclaimer - I don't work for Citrix, but I use their stuff a lot.
-Jeff
LOL, fair enough. I got a 4, tho. :D
Did you read what *I* wrote? The article says 20 years. I said 15.
Forgive me if my math is off, but if Moore's law states that processing power roughly doubles every 18 months, wouldn't a 1000-fold increase occur in about 15 years?
Maybe they're designing the next generation Playstation on a Pentium machine. Did they ever fix that bug?
-Jeff
The article (on Gamespy) was overly optimistic. This type of technology works fairly well in fast a LAN environment (maybe an internet cafe that caters to gamers) but over home broadband, it's just not where it needs to be for content-heavy games. Loading faster than a CD? I'm seriously doubtful, since I've worked for companies delivering similar services.
Companies like Exent with their Games on Demand type solution and Softricity with their application on demand stuff have come a long way, by making local caches secure to thwart pirates, and by utilizing algorithms to anticipate what parts of the code you will need next, reducing the wait when a new code chunk needs to be downloaded. But the fact remains that at this point, if you have a dedicated line (DSL) your bandwidth probably isn't much higher than 640K, and if you're on cable, who knows what you're really getting when your neighbor is downloading bootleg porno for his collection.
Diablo-style games that generate dungeons on demand can suffer from serious lag because all of the code, at one point or another, has to get pulled across the wire. And when you're surrounded by 500 orcs trying to hack your way to freedom, do you really want the game to get choppy and unresponsive? Racing games that load everything and then just run from memory work much better, but you still wait. The idea is sound, but games are just too bloated for the average guy's broadband pipe. Maybe in a year or five, if access gets faster and cheaper.
-Jeff
The biggest offender for me? Resume bots. I post my resume to see if people are hiring, and I get 12 messages a day from OTHER resume posting sites trying to get me to go there and post again.
If they're smart enough to grab my email addy, why can't they harvest my resume too and leave me alone?
-skip
In the article, a fan of the technology mentions that the machine is only scanning what's on the front of the license. This may be true, but depending on where you live, that can be a lot more info than you want people tracking.
In the state of Massachusetts, unless you request otherwise, your license number is your social security number. Granted, license records are public, so if you want, you can get the info anyway, but it seems that allowing someone to scan your license and get not only your physical info, but also your SSN is not very smart.
That brings us to the question of who is going to be responsible for the data - if a restaraunt isn't careful with their database and an unscrupulous employee snags it, they now have hundreds of records with names, addresses, height, weight, and SSNs. There's all kinds of mischief they could wreak with that kind of info. In these days of rampant credit card fraud and identity theft, you'd think people would think things through a little better.
Lastly, what about lawsuits? Could I sue a bar that, without my explicit permission, scanned my card and recorded all the data? If a business was busily copying down all the info on the front of my license, I would certainly object. If I didn't know they were doing it, I would have no chance to...
-skip
A year or two ago I got a refurbed generation 1 2G Jaz drive from PCConnection for about $130 (yeah, I know, the folly of buying a drive that crapped out on someone else...). But it was replacing a drive that had died on me the year before, leaving me with about 20GB of useless cartridges that cost about $100 apiece. Anyway, the drive showed up in the mail and didn't work. PCConnection made me deal with Iomega directly.
Iomega was actually quite helpful as long as I put up with all of the handholding and troubleshooting steps they read of their scripts before telling them what the problem was. They sent me a replacement - another refurbed drive. If worked - for 3 days, then died. I also found out that the first drive munged one of my carts. Another call, they sent me another drive. This one worked for a week and then died. I now had 2 bad carts (killed by their drives) and I had gone through three refurbed drives. I tried to remain calm, explaining how it was not acceptable for them to keep eating my carts by sending me defective drives.
The told me they could not offer any data recovery services, and that I used the old carts at my own risk. However, to make up for my trouble, they sent me a brand new drive and brand new carts to replace the ones that got eaten.
Not an ideal situation, but to their credit, they did make a decent attempt to do right by me, and for my $130 and a bit of hassle, I got myself a $300 drive and another $300 worth of new carts. This was a pretty good experience compared to the horror stories of Iomega customer service back in the early days of Zip disks.
-Jeff
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 consider myself experienced enough in Citrix to offer an opposing viewpoint here. I have set up perhaps 10 different server farms for different companies, ranging from single-server installs up to a farm of 60 servers. Good planning and good testing (a necessity for any new server deployment) is all that's needed to get a stable and easy to manage Citrix environment. Nobody should be running a single server Citrix environment anyway - you'd have to be nuts to run your whole user base on one box. Use Citrix load balancing (or DNS round robin, for that matter) and split your load. If you lose a box, the users get kicked, sure, but they can reconnect immediately to one of your other servers and keep working. Someone else posted that they use quad xeon boxes with 2 GB RAM and 80GB of disk space - this is folly. IF you spend the same money on a pair of dual proc boxes, you get better performance and redundancy. Why all the disk space? You should only need space for the apps to be installed - all user data should be on a separate file server that gets backed up nightly. That way, if you lose a Citrix box, the user can still get their files...