[Infrastructures] how to build an internal (local) filestructure?

[Devdas Bhagat]

On 31/03/05 11:58 +0200, Christer Bernérus wrote:
> Thin clients are good.
> We have deployed some 200 SunRay clients here. The cost of handling 
> these is very low.
> 
> However thin clients re-introduces some aspects of life that was common 
> in the old timesharing environments. If you run unnecessary things e.g. 
> a screen "saver" displaying nice pictures, you are using up valuable 
> resources for someone else. Likewise, leaving a browser in a site full 
> of animation can cost more cpu cycles than the average user is aware 
> of. When you have 100 users on a server, things may get a little 
> slow...

You could choose not to install heavy applications like that. A minimal
desktop environment, along with suitable nice values for browsers and
screensavers should work out quite well, I think.

> 
> This can somewhat be alleviated by using the Thin client servers as 
> display servers only, and doing heavy computation on some other server, 
> but that again complicates your infrastructure.
> 

I was thinking			|---- Application Server 1
		client -- xdm --|---- Application Server 2
			server	|---- Home directory server

The xdm server provides xdmcp (or equivalent services), and it has a
bunch of scripts instead of applications. The script merely ssh'es out
to the appropriate application server, and runs the application there,
exporting the display to the client.

This lets you keep your mission critial applications in one place, and the
browsers/other non essential applications elsewhere.

I wonder if this setup would work well in practice?

Devdas Bhagat