I've gone back to college and we are in thin client hell...

[Pixel_Outlaw]

Well I'm taking a college course just for the heck of it. Let me just say that the network plan they had adopted is making most power users and students tear their hair out. They have adopted thin clients. Actually they are not thin clients they are more like zero clients as they have more RAM than drive space. Compiling code is a living hell and the thin clients are actually Linux machines that have some odd Windows layer running on top of them. They sport 512 MB of RAM and no internal storage. I value your opinions here and so my instructor asked me if I could gather some general feelings about a possible solution. Maybe you can offer your opinions?

 I personally feel that these thin clients are a bad idea when you have 30 students writing demanding programs all on the same server.   


From my instructor:

The networking types have installed a thin client working of a Win 2003 terminal server. The first problem arises when doing program development using Visual Studio 2010. If someone has made a mistake in a loop leading to a non-terminating logic error (infinite loop), the client completely locks up and one cannot break out of the command line window. To get out, one has to do a complete hard shutdown of the client. Even that does not always work. Some folks have come back after a couple of days only to find that the infinite loop is still grinding onward. If one is extremely lucky, the shutdown restart sequence works ok. Otherwise, you are stuck. Is there anything inherent in thin-client/terminal servers that prevent them from working properly in a programming environment? Is there something wrong with the configuration? Is it simply under-powered? Is there something else that we are overlooking?

[Jim]

The usual arguments for thin clients have nothing to do with quality of service, but to do with IT department maintenance bills.  Much easier to upgrade one copy of Windows Terminal Server than it is to roll out a patch to multiple desktops.

They are almost always underpowered, and anyone doing more than Excel or Word is stuffed.
A company I worked for spent millions getting rid of desktops for sales and marketing and replaced them with thin clients.  They were universally hated and less than two years later they spent millions replacing them with desktops again.

I'm not sure there's anything that says that if the TS has enough CPU cores and enough RAM and that bandwidth between you and it is OK that it won't work for developing, but then my workstation has a quad core i7, 8Gb of memory, and a 7000rpm disk to do .Net development and that replaced my old 4Gb machine which had ground to a halt.  Noone will provide that kind of service level per-user on a TS (you're probably all sharing that amount).

I'd just set my 'digits of pi' generator going, with 256 threads, and see how much mess that could make.

Jim

[Pixel_Outlaw]

As always, thanks for the prompt response Jim.
I'm sure my instructor will appreciate your 2 cents.

[spathi]

X server exporting windows to clients.  This should work with thin clients and should be great for compiling.  Rdist to maintain and update software on the clients.  I'd run Ubuntu or Debian (or whatever linux) on the desktops.

Any IT department that would run that sort of janky-ass windows citrix bullshit for a programming environment should all be sacked, there is simply no excuse whatsoever.

With X you can have a thin client solution on the cheap that will work.

Right now at this moment I am doing this, sort of.  I do not have a thin client for a desktop, rather a good Windows 7 gaming desktop, but I run Cygwin X exporting X sessions from my linux box.  The X sessions are very small and do not take much RAM at all on the client.

At least in academic computing environments you would think that IT departments would be savvy enough to not engage in such silliness when there are far better solutions.  You can have an excellent thin client setup (particularly if all clients are set up with distCC for distributed compiling, it will be super fast for everyone).

But you are not ever going to get there with windows and it's a fool's errand to even try.