I've been working at the National Library of Wales developing an LTSP based system for our new Readers Room. We had decided to replace the old full WinNT desktops with LTSP stations served off a 1u Intel Xeon Server running Redhat 9 (for the trial system). I'm currently in the process of setting up the servers for the deployment version (Redhat Advanced Server on the same hardware). I personally found the LTSP for Libraries HowTo very useful, after reading it and a day's worth of work in it - our system happily serves Firefox to the terminals. You should bear in mind though that serving applications like Office to each terminal will mean quite a lot of your bandwidth being taken up. If its running on the same physical network as the rest of your machines (which it *really* shoudn't be imho) then your staff are going to start complaining. As for security concerns... provided the terminals arent served with an XTerm and you restrict the user logged in only to their home directory, firewall off the server and isolate it from the rest of your network (consider sticking it on a seperate V-LAN to the rest of your network) and keep the machine up to date. Then it will most likely be as safe as any other machine on your network.
Slashdot Mirror
I recently watched Blood Waters of Dr Z. and Space Mutiny -- Both are quite terrible and its only thanks to MST3K that I survived...
I've been working at the National Library of Wales developing an LTSP based system for our new Readers Room. We had decided to replace the old full WinNT desktops with LTSP stations served off a 1u Intel Xeon Server running Redhat 9 (for the trial system). I'm currently in the process of setting up the servers for the deployment version (Redhat Advanced Server on the same hardware).
I personally found the LTSP for Libraries HowTo very useful, after reading it and a day's worth of work in it - our system happily serves Firefox to the terminals.
You should bear in mind though that serving applications like Office to each terminal will mean quite a lot of your bandwidth being taken up. If its running on the same physical network as the rest of your machines (which it *really* shoudn't be imho) then your staff are going to start complaining.
As for security concerns... provided the terminals arent served with an XTerm and you restrict the user logged in only to their home directory, firewall off the server and isolate it from the rest of your network (consider sticking it on a seperate V-LAN to the rest of your network) and keep the machine up to date. Then it will most likely be as safe as any other machine on your network.
Bryn