[ok-mail] [K12OSN] Scalability (long email)

Mon Apr 12 14:29:35 UTC 2004

You mentioned that the applications only work with IE, and CrossOver Office 
didn't 'cut it'.  Could you elaborate on the problem(s) with that configuration? 
  I'm in a somewhat analogous situation, in that my company's internal 
webservers are all IIS and the people who code the apps for them like to write 
to MS standards rather than W3C standards, such that several things on the 
websites won't work with anything but IE.  I've had CrossOver Office 2.x 
installed for the past year, but the experience has been disappointing: 
Favorites wouldn't save, nor would passwords, javascript wouldn't run properly, 
etc.

*However*, I recently got an alpha version of CX Office 3.x that fixed all the 
above problems with IE.  The big problem app for me was the ticket tracking 
system at our help desk.  Under the new version of CXO, everything worked like a 
champ.  So, you might inquire with CodeWeavers about testing IE under their 
development version to see if it would work with your apps.

Petre

norbert wrote:
> Hi Terrell,
> 
> Thanks for the response. To answer why the twenty + client on terminal 
> server, well it isn't by choice ! The school board has some applications 
> that are a must and these *only work with IE*. I've tried;
> Crossoveroffice  - it doesn't cut it for the applications they need !
> Win4lin - is limited to Win 9x & is too expensive
> VMware - I have not been able to get more than a couple of thin clients 
> running with it & costs !!!
> 
> The applications are Edusystems, Kidpix (no Tuxpaint is not acceptable) 
> & FirstClass (the linux local client works well but there is no server 
> version yet.
> 
> Now the final "kink" in this problem is that there are non-profit 
> organisations that give Win2K server & CAL licenses for *free* to 
> educational institutions, so this is giving preference to a M$ solution 
> as long as these apps cannot run with browsers on linux.
> 
> If you have *any* suggestions to avoid using M$ please let me know !
> 
> thanks
> norbert
> 
> microman at cmosnetworks.com wrote:
> 
>> It wasn't my choice, unfortunately.  Back then I worked for not just a 
>> Microsoft shop, but a totally rabid Microsoft shop.  The very notion 
>> of running anything that was Free Software was total anathema to this 
>> company.  They basically subscribed to the notion that, "if it *can* 
>> run on NT/2000, it *will* run on NT/2000."  Actually putting 
>> OpenOffice.org on anybody's computer might well have gotten me fired, 
>> even if the user had specifically asked for it, unless it had been a 
>> major partner (wasn't gonna happen).
>>
>> So, to answer your question, we never took them off of Microsoft in 
>> the first place.  We simply made them run their apps locally again.
>>
>> That does bring to mind a question, though:  Norbert, can you tell us 
>> why you need to run twenty client sessions on a Windows Terminal 
>> Server?  Would folks not be better suited by a K12LTSP server?
>>
>> --TP
>>
>> Brian Chase wrote:
>>
>>> This must be why Citrix is so successful, because the native WTS does 
>>> such a poor job of it.  What I can't figure out is why you took your 
>>> whole office staff back to Microsoft when OpenOffice has been out for 
>>> several years now.
>>>
>>> Terrell Prude', Jr. wrote:
>>>
>>>> That's one of the major problems with Windows Terminal Server; the 
>>>> underlying platform's just not efficient.  The RDP protocol used 
>>>> with it is reasonably efficient, but the server itself gets S-L-O-W 
>>>> very quickly.  I never did more than five on a dual-PIII, 900MHz, 
>>>> 1GB DRAM box w/ Ultra3-SCSI RAID, back when I was running Windows 
>>>> networks, for performance reasons; with any more, the CPUs kept 
>>>> pegging, and the memory subsystem kept almost continuously swapping 
>>>> to disk.  As it was, there was plenty of swapping, and the CPUs were 
>>>> heavily used.  We also had stability issues with user applications 
>>>> (e. g. Microsoft Office).  We ended up using Terminal Services only 
>>>> for us sysadmins and making everyone run MS Office on their desktops 
>>>> again.  Boy, did we learn!
>>>>
>>>> If for some reason you have to do this for twenty clients on one 
>>>> server, then I'd recommend going for, at a minimum, a four processor 
>>>> box, with max GHz (currently we're talking either Xeon 3.2GHz's or 
>>>> Opteron 2.2GHz's (that's the 848 model, BTW).  Also, better have no 
>>>> less than 4GB DRAM, and more is definitely not overkill.
>>>>
>>>> --TP
>>>>
>>>> norbert wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> Ooops that's a P-III & just for clarification we're using K12LTSP 
>>>>> with diskless client, from each client we launch a rdesktop session.
>>>>>
>>>>> thks again
>>>>> norbert
>>>>>
>>>>> bear2bar at netscape.net wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>> Hi,
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Has anyone setup rdesktop with linux on 20 + workstations ? (With 
>>>>>> Win2K) and what specs are needed for the Win2K server to handle 
>>>>>> the load.
>>>>>> We've setup a P-II 500 Mhz with 512mb ram and can barely launch 3 
>>>>>> connections. The response is incrediblly SLOW....
>>>>>>
>>>>>> thanks for the input
>>>>>>
>>>>>> norbert
>>>>>>
>>>>>> jhansknecht at hanstech.com wrote:
>>>>>>
>>>>>>> On Tue, 2004-04-06 at 21:26, Shawn Powers wrote:
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>  
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> snip
>>>>>>>> I have 3 schools, all connected via fiber.  There are approx 30 
>>>>>>>> classrooms per building, with a variation of 10 & 100mbit 
>>>>>>>> connections internally.  The 2 big directions I'm looking at 
>>>>>>>> would be to have 90 "mini-labs", where a teacher gets a new 
>>>>>>>> white-box Pentium 4 computer, and have it serve as a classroom 
>>>>>>>> LTSP server to 5 or 6 "junker" thin clients for the students 
>>>>>>>> (much like the original case study Paul Nelson put up several 
>>>>>>>> years back).  If the student management system won't work under 
>>>>>>>> Wine -- that teacher computer would have to run win4lin or some 
>>>>>>>> such solution.
>>>>>>>>   
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> Instead of win4lin think about using a Windows terminal server with
>>>>>>> rdesktop. ....you will need to spend a little but I suspect you 
>>>>>>> will be
>>>>>>> able to conqueror this application requirement.
>>>>>>>  
>>>>>>>
>>
>>
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