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Re: [school-discuss] Wireless network ambulance for classrooms w/o wired network connectivity



cdmiller wrote:
Damiano Verzulli wrote:

Daniel Howard wrote:

[...] convert our elementary school's network to support LTSP/thin clients, one of the challenges we have is that due to construction [....]



Please note that, while driving along the way of the LTSP/thin_client adoption, another challenge you might face with, expecially employing wireless-lans, it's the bandwidth!


As the standard LTSP rely on the X protocol and the X protocol consumes lot of bandwidth, I think that with a 11Mbps links you could experience some problems!


Having run rooms full of X Terminals and workstations using X applications and NFS mounted home and application directories on 10 Mbps wired links in the semi distant past with no trouble, I personally don't see the bandwidth concern with using X over 802.11b, and 802.11g is also cheaply available. The ease of sniffing passwords etc. on unencrypted wireless or wired networks is of course a different problem.


- cameron

I wouldn't base wireless performance estimates off of wired experience. You would have to know what the collision avoidance algorithm is and how well a wireless network deals with congestion. I'm not sure that a hub-based wired network would even be comparable.

By the way, I would recommend checking on what wireless cards might be
supported by etherboot if you are going to be booting thin clients over
a wireless network.  This wouldn't be an issue if you use a wireless
router in the non-wired classroom to bridge to an AP on the wired
network.  That way all of your clients can be wired to the router.
I suspect this might also help with wireless traffic congestion,
since the router would be metering traffic over the radio.

-Don

--
Don Christensen       Senior Software Development Engineer
djc@xxxxxxxxx         Cisco Systems, Santa Cruz, CA
  "It was a new day yesterday, but it's an old day now."