🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂 🙁
You like Redhat? You like running linux, but wish you could find a way to run linux on a bunch of crappy machines? Wish there was a quick way to set this up without having to take a lot of time to set everything up? Have a bunch of crappy machines that are without hard drives? Wish I would stop asking so many questions? If so pick up this cool distro mod. These people have done a nice job of taking Redhat’s version of linux and adding a setup that will build you a nice Terminal Server straight out of the cds.
I set this up the other day on some extra hardware and it is Tres Cool. Install is all kinds of straight forward and when it is done it works. That is all there is. I only ran into one little glitch. Most of the time I do not start in Runlevel 5. When I did the install I told it to go to runlevel 3 and that was it. Then my clients could not pull up X. It took me a sec to remember that they had to connect to the server to run their stuff and therefore the server needed to be running GDM. So I pulled up rc.5. eth0 is used for the local network with the thin clients and eth1 is used for the regular LAN. There are several advantages to this that I have found and I cannot find any real disadvantages to it. Because everything runs off the server you don’t have to any NATing or anything and you only use one IP in the LAN for your stuff. The distro does install a DHCP server for eth0 though so make sure that you don’t plug that one into the normal LAN. The only thing that I can think of as a bad thing is that all the traffic going onto the normall LAN is going through the one pipe, but I think that is a trival thing unless you have a lot of people downloading lots of files. This setup also keeps all your client traffic off the normal net and as long as you use somewhat decent networking gear (might want to stay away from 10meg hubs for more than 10 clients… shoot for switches) I think everything should work really well. One thing I think would be nice for SOMEONE to do would be to make the Xserver compress some of the data before it sends it out the card.
Anyway I think it is a decent download and since it has Redhat underneath it and the install is the same you can use it to install regular Redhat 7.2 if you want. Perhaps a patch to the Redhat ISO would be cool as well.