Date: Wed, 16 May 2001 00:49:40 +0100 From: David Groves <david.groves@imagination.com> To: questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Using PC's as X Terminals Message-ID: <3B01C094.204FB92B@imagination.com> References: <3B011EA3.5234DB81@imagination.com>
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David Groves wrote: > > I'm trying to find a way to turn client machines (i386 machines running > other operating systems that can't be replaced), into dumb X terminals > on a part time basis. The people that will be using them are mainly > going to be running windows the majority of the time, but will have the > need to dip into an X environment on occasion. For various reasons, my > superiors are unwilling to consider Win32 X servers, so this isn't an > option for me. > > The ideal solution from my point of view is to have a removable boot > disk which you insert when you want to use the machine as an X terminal. > The X terminals will then usually be used to connect to a single > machine, the lab "workstation". However they will occasionally need to > connect to other hosts, so I'm going to need to run the "chooser". > > 1.) Have the entire system on the boot media, ie. the kernel, the X > server, and the other bare minimum things needed to get a system up and > running. > > 2.) Do a netboot. Boot from a floppy which does something like etherboot > to bring up a working system. > > ===== > > Questions. > > a.) If I use option 2, can I NFS mount all the file systems needed by a > bunch of heterogeneous clients from the same place. If I can, what > configuration issues do I have (like /tmp). > > b.) If I use option 1, what do I do about files that need to be written. > Can I easily use something like a ramdisk with FreeBSD (I imagine I > can), or a NFS mount (which gets me back into the same problems as (A). > > c.) Something totally different, the totally obvious solution that I've > missed. > > d.) What is the 'chooser'. AFAICT, it is a prompt for what machine you > want to serve up your X session from. The XDM documentation has me > scratching my head to figure this out though. > > e.) Also, what are the security concerns here. I know I'm going to be > using a lot of potentially icky things, like NFS with it's trust of > client UID's, possibly TFTP with it's problems. I can accept some > security trade-offs in my environment (which is well contained), but I > want to know what problems I may have to worry about in the future. > > -- > ____________________________________________________________________ > Imagination 25 Store Street South Crescent London WC1E 7BL England | > Tel +44 20 7323 3300 Fax +44 20 7323 5801 | > _______________________________________________________| > > To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org > with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message Thanks to everyone so far for the help. Sadly none if it is actually useful to me for various reasons. Ted suggested creating a bare bones partition on the disk, this isn't an option because part of the specification for the project states that the machines can't be touched, and this would involve attacking them with partition magic or something. We can boot from either CD or floppy though. Doug and Matt both suggested using VNC. I'm a great fan of VNC, and in fact we already use it for various things, but I feel that either using that, or using the Cygnus XFree86 port to Win32 would be the best option. Cygwin XFree86 (http://sources.redhat.com/cygwin/xfree/) seems to me to be 100% reliable, can be used on any windows machine (although it works notably faster on NT than on 9x), and could be configured to connect to a FreeBSD machine running XDM. For various reasons though, this isn't an option (mainly that my superiors don't like it). I'm going to plug on with remote booting client workstations with etherboot. Afaik, I can mount the following partitions read-only without problems :- / /bin /etc /sbin /usr I'm less sure about /var /tmp In fact, I'm going up a path I don't know a lot about here. Ideally I'm searching for a disk that makes a machine an X terminal. It doesn't have to be doing anything unixy underneath, it doesn't have to be using FreeBSD, it can be doing anything. It just has to work. My prowling of the web found numerous articles suggesting ways you can use Linux to do it, but all of them were assuming you could use a small amount of disk space local to the machine. Although I can have a large amount of read only data space (booting from CD), I can't have much RW (the spare space on a floppy is all, and that is always going to be dreadfully slow and unreliable). I could also of course create a RAM disk. I also found (http://www.freebsd.org/tutorials/diskless-x/index.html). It is long time out of date, but if you change most of it to use Etherboot instead of the remote boot stuff in the FreeBSD core (the comments in /usr/src/.../wherever/the/remote/boot is suggest removing that part of the code because of etherboot) then this should still work. I'm still worried about the sharing of the file systems by numerous clients (particularly /tmp and /var), and the security problems of NFS/TFTP. Any comments ? To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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