Posted by: Anonymous Coward
on April 15, 2005 02:46 AM
I wholeheartedly agree to the viability of a Thin Client / Fat Server concept for Linux. From this point of view I welcome any publication promoting this.
But oh, how I hate it, if they all use the data and arguments from 10 years ago:
>> As a rule of thumb, an unswitched 100Mbps network can handle about a dozen thin clients;
My dear friend -- this is data that describes plain vanilla X11 connections. These may have been state of the art back in 1995. But now we have 2005. Today there exists a technology called NX which does a marvelous job in compressing X(11) and even VNC and RDP traffic. With NX a remote X connection becomes really usable even over 56kbps modem links, or ISDN. You can hardly tell the difference to a local session. NX can easily cram 1,000 NX ssessions into a 100MBit link -- because each one will run with a bandwidth consumption of 40 kkbps or less. And then the link is not even saturated yet. Make your LAN a switched one, and you go up to 8,000 sessions at the same time cramming into the 100Mbit cable.
>>10 users [...] require [...] something along the lines of a dual 3GHz Pentium 4 with 2GB of RAM.
For your kind information: with NX, such a machine will be able to host at least 40+ user sessions, put in another 4 GB and host 120+ sessions on it. This scenario assumes that every user runs a full KDE desktop, plus OpenOffice for word processing, plus Firefox for web browsing, plus Konqueror for file management, plus KMail for emailing, and it knows for sure that *at the most* each user session will only take 50 MHz of CPU and 50 MBytes of RAM...
Roderick, you are doing the Linux community a dis-service with the kind of figures you name. Because our main competitors on this field, Citrix/ICA and Microsoft/RDP are both *much* more efficient than what you describe. Both can run very responsive sessions on a dial-up link (even non-DSL ones).
No-one in a top 1000 enterprise will ever consider switching from Windows with Citrix or Terminal Servers to your solution if the performance you describe is all that is available.
To compete with the level of ICA or RDP network performance (and even surpass it) you'd need to turn to the new kid on the block: NX.
Roderick, please use current facts, figures and arguments to back up your book. Please describe state of the art technology, not 10 or 20 year old one. Read up, <A HREF="http://www.nomachine.com/testdrive.php" title="nomachine.com">test it yourself</a nomachine.com>.
I am not going to buy the book now that I know you do not even mention <A HREF="http://www.nomachine.com/" title="nomachine.com">NX</a nomachine.com>, <A HREF="https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/freenx-knx" title="kde.org">FreeNX</a kde.org> or NoMachine.
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Bah! Using '95 data - '05 NX can do much better!
Posted by: Anonymous Coward on April 15, 2005 02:46 AMI wholeheartedly agree to the viability of a Thin Client / Fat Server concept for Linux. From this point of view I welcome any publication promoting this.
But oh, how I hate it, if they all use the data and arguments from 10 years ago:
Roderick, you are doing the Linux community a dis-service with the kind of figures you name. Because our main competitors on this field, Citrix/ICA and Microsoft/RDP are both *much* more efficient than what you describe. Both can run very responsive sessions on a dial-up link (even non-DSL ones).
No-one in a top 1000 enterprise will ever consider switching from Windows with Citrix or Terminal Servers to your solution if the performance you describe is all that is available.
To compete with the level of ICA or RDP network performance (and even surpass it) you'd need to turn to the new kid on the block: NX.
Roderick, please use current facts, figures and arguments to back up your book. Please describe state of the art technology, not 10 or 20 year old one. Read up, <A HREF="http://www.nomachine.com/testdrive.php" title="nomachine.com">test it yourself</a nomachine.com>.
I am not going to buy the book now that I know you do not even mention <A HREF="http://www.nomachine.com/" title="nomachine.com">NX</a nomachine.com>, <A HREF="https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/freenx-knx" title="kde.org">FreeNX</a kde.org> or NoMachine.
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