OpenSLX

= OpenSLX: Linux Diskless Clients =

OpenSLX - the name is rather fresh - aims on the Linux desktop as a middleware solution to provide easy administration of large bunchs of computers.

An OpenSLX client is just a Linux workstation as you would expect, if you have installed just any distribution onto the local disk. The average user will not see any difference ...

For the administrator things change significantly: All software installation is done to a central server  (or servers for failover)  and provided via network in a way similar to the well known [http://www.ltsp.org/ LTSP]. So our project  uses the same infrastructure of PXE/etherboot/gPXE, DHCP and TFTP for initial booting and then NFS, NBD, ... for the rootfilesystem of the clients. Different to LTSP the users logs in to the machine locally and not to a remote server (this is still all possible too, but not the main focus). So the local resources  of the machine are used and the user has easy access to all devices of his machine (USB, IEEE1394, CD/DVD(burner), floppy,...) Plus he is able to play any 3D game,   watch videos and may connect audio devices like headset, microphone ...

Thus the roofilesystem is bigger than the one needed for average LTSP installation and  the bandwidth requirements may exceed the requirements of the LTSP pendant. A typical OpenSLX client requires up to 150MBytes until the GUI login is possible and then 40 -100MBytes until the KDE, Gnome GUI session is loaded. If using rootfilesystem ontop of  network block device (NBD) - squashfs (highly compressed readonly filesystem known from embedded devices) the required bandwidth falls by a factor of up to 3. We have implemented  a special caching blockdevice  which could be used in shared medium networks for  reducing the  total amount of packets the server has to sent for all clients in a subnet.

There is no requirement for a big terminal server onto which all users in a typical LTSP client environment would login too. A good fileserver with a not to small amount of memory for block caching and fast disks will do. This OpenSLX server (running DHCP and TFTP when not already covered elsewhere) could serve easily more then 100 clients (depending on the network bandwidth and structure).