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Responses
by Dave Richards on Wednesday 25/Jul/2001, @12:19
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Our announcement to kde-devel has certainly gotten a lot of emails and comments. I appreciate the suggestions and thoughts. I haven't seen any people doing things the same way, because more people set up departmental servers, but instead we are running application servers. Each of our servers performs one function.
I read all of your comments, and will respond to the questions asked.
* Yes, I would love to help with a detailed how-to guide for this kind of rollout. The cost savings are just amazing. Anyone buy NT licenses yet for thin clients? They have dropped all concurrent licenses, and it's going to cost anyone that wants to use NT a fortune. Thankfully, we have always been mostly a Unix shop where concurrent prices are the norm. Centralized NT only supports about 40-50 on the same hardware that we can get hundreds on with Linux/Unix.
* Wallpapers. Anyone that has worked for Government understands our concerns. Not only can we get sued, but all it takes is one newspaper reporter coming in and seeing something, *anything* with which to write an article to sell papers. "City Employee Uses Taxpayer Dollars To Have Offensive Background". The 8 bit color thing is another issue, non-technical people have no idea what they are doing to their color cells. Wallpapers come up *first*, so your 256 colors are gone before any software is started. Also, people were picking wallpapers stored in NFS mounted drivers. It is unknown what happens to KDE when it tries to get wallpaper from an NFS mount that is down for whatever reason (reboot, etc). It might just *hang* and wait. Anyone ever try and do an ls in a mount that is down? Or 'df'?
* The 11MB of memory thing was good news for us. Being that memory has dropped so much, we can certainly accomodate that per user. Sticks of 1GB are about 1500 dollars, very cheap. KDE 1 running on Unixware was only a partial deployment in order to get them used to KDE for a few years until we installed this version. We only ran the kpanel only, window management came from the terminals. In KDE2, we are using 100% of KDE, window management is being done on the host.
* NAS is the sound system being used. NAS is client/server and works almost the same way that Xwindows does. The guys at NCD did a great job with it. It's available for free now. I know that some people have looked at doing a Win32 port of it (another question asked). I would suggest getting on the NAS list server and if you want to try and port it, that would be great.
* Network performance is fine, we are hardly using any of our network. The network really should be a major part of a white paper we make one. Xwindows needs realtime access to the servers, and some switches do store-and-forward which is tested and designed for client/server only. What it does is hold stuff for a good time to send them, which kind of doesn't work well when you are typing things and the keystrokes are going back and forth. ;) We have a Gig backbone, and fiber was run to all of the closets in the city, and then each closet has switched 3com 3900 devices. We don't have any hubs in the whole city. The switches automatically hide all of the broadcasts between switches. NAS works in realtime. In fact, we run the Realplayer over the network, and the sound and video are in sync.
* We use rsh because the big server only does KDE. One of the biggest things that people complain about with 'mainframes' is that if the mainframe is down, everything is down. So they way that you get around that is that you build applications servers. If one machine is down, or being rebooted, only one option from the Kpanel is inactive. Everything else works. Okay, so WordPerfect is down for 10 minutes, I'll read my email or check something on the web. From the user perspective, it looks like one big machine, but each icon choice is calling a different machine. The rsh sends the signals over to that machine to initiate a session and check to make sure that user has permissions to run that software. NT with Citrix accepts rsh commands and can start up software that way in an Xwindow via the UIS. This is really cool because it turns off the Windows Start bar and all options of NT. Only the software requested via the rsh is started.
My very old presentation at SCO Forum 99 is still out there-->
http://www.sco.com/skunkware/largo/
We have been running this design for about 7-8 years now, but the power of KDE has certainly given us a lot better front end for our users.
Regards!
Dave |
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