Tools/draktermserv
From Mandriva
Contents |
Installation
Install the package terminal-server and run drakTermServ from a console window. It gets you up and running with a complete Terminal Server Solution to feed thin clients which start from a boot diskette -- you can generate them with drakTermServ -- or, if you have the equipment to burn it, from a bootrom on a NIC. Unfortunately this is not very well documented anywhere. I searched at the Mandrake website and other sources mentioning it.
NOTE: It's a not very secure implementation, so I strongly recommend to run this behind a separate firewall.
Hardware recommendations
I've done some implementations in classrooms and from my experience an Athlon 2.4 with 1Gig of RAM and a fast hdd serves the MDK 9.0 and 9.1 desktop fairly well to about ten or fifteen Pentium 75 Mhz terminals with 32 MB RAM and no harddisks which now seem to appear in the same league as a 600-800 Mhz Celeron. The more power and RAM to the server the more the thin clients will rock. ... nearly forgot, 100 MBit network is a must.
More hints
One source of problems you can stumble about with the ltsp.org terminal server is the display manager. I simply didn't try to use the mdkdm in Mandrake 9.1 with draktermserv- though the shuddering screen is funny- I stayed on the secure side with kdm and put the schools logo on it.)
See also
To get more information about thin client computing, look at the http://www.ltsp.org/ website which I think is the parent of the DrakTermServ. The Drak is much faster in implementation but better try http://www.ltsp.org/ 's manual setup once or twice to catch the do's and dont's. The documentation there is complete and the underlying system is nearly the same. Another source is http://www.etherboot.net/.
