[K12OSN] TuxType on Clients

[Les Mikesell]

On Tue, 2004-12-07 at 17:28, Debbie Schiel wrote:

> Hi Doug, we have a gig nic on the server but I think the switches are 
> the standard unexpensive kind 10/100 ... and I'm showing my ignorance 
> now but I don't know the difference between a switch/hub. I do 
> understand that a switch is better, right?

Hubs forward all traffic to all ports.  Switches learn the hardware
(MAC) address of the connected devices and only forward the traffic
addressed to each, plus broadcasts of course.  Since all the clients
talk to the same server, even with a switch you'll end up with a
copy of all the traffic on the server connection, and a bottleneck. 
Anything that does moving graphics will be a problem on several clients
at once. 

> Plus the clients in our mini-lab have to go through three switches 
> before reaching the actual pipe that goes into the server.

To fix this, you'll need to either move the server so the server
connects to a gig port on the same switch where each client
connects directly, or use gig connections through the intermediate
ports (i.e. where the traffic is concentrated onto one wire).


> > Has anyone tried running tuxtype as a local app on the client?
> >
> 
> Not sure how this is done on a client booting to the server, but I'd 
> love to give it a go. Could you please forward some instructions?

I haven't done it either, and it may not be a win if the clients
are much slower than the server.  I thought there was a section
on the wiki about local apps but I can't find it now.  Another
promising possibility is using NX.  There are some mentions of it
in the mail list archives but I don't think anyone mentioned if
it will solve this problem or just take more server RAM and CPU
if all the clients use it.

---
  Les Mikesell
    les at futuresource.com