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Poettering: The Most Awesome, Least-Advertised Fedora 17 FeaturePoettering: The Most Awesome, Least-Advertised Fedora 17 FeaturePosted May 2, 2012 23:10 UTC (Wed) by gdt (subscriber, #6284)In reply to: Poettering: The Most Awesome, Least-Advertised Fedora 17 Feature by epa Parent article: Poettering: The Most Awesome, Least-Advertised Fedora 17 Feature
like university computer labs... Uni computing labs are a size up from where this is useful, they have 40 to 400 computers whereas multi-head is more useful for 4. The length limitations of USB cabling means you can't cheaply move expensive and privacy-sensitive hardware out of the computing lab and into a secure space. The cheapest ethernet-using robust computers are small form factor PCs, with a trend to have no unreliable rotating storage but using cheap CF cards. They are usually configured as stateless or puppet-maintained computers. Once they get graphics card sharing going then you might want to connect multiple screens and keyboards to those lab computers.
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Poettering: The Most Awesome, Least-Advertised Fedora 17 Feature Posted May 3, 2012 0:24 UTC (Thu) by josh (subscriber, #17465) [Link]
> Uni computing labs are a size up from where this is useful, they have 40 to 400 computers whereas multi-head is more useful for 4.
You can still use multi-head to have four monitors/keyboards/mice per physical box, reducing your lab from 40-400 systems to 10-100 systems.
Also, USB-over-Ethernet extenders exist, and you could use those to run a whole lab from a small handful of servers. Many computer labs already use semi-thin clients (where you SSH elsewhere if you want a pile of computing power), and this seems like a natural extension.
Poettering: The Most Awesome, Least-Advertised Fedora 17 Feature Posted May 3, 2012 13:28 UTC (Thu) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]
Not to also mention that off the shelf consumer hardware is significantly cheaper and more powerful then what you typically see with thin client hardware. So even if you are just provisioning for thin clients or 'semi-thin clients' you can still come out ahead.
However, The type of VGA/keyboard/mouse clients were you have a small box you connect to a desktop/desktop server type thing over long twisted wire pairs do have a significant advantage that they are mostly tamper proof and are useless to the thief if stolen.
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