From owner-freebsd-questions Tue May 15 5:18:55 2001 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from mailgate.imagination.co.uk (mailgate.imagination.co.uk [212.140.144.32]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id D086A37B423 for ; Tue, 15 May 2001 05:18:51 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from david.groves@imagination.com) Received: from imagination.com (dhcp-79-244.imagination.co.uk [192.168.79.244]) by mailgate.imagination.co.uk (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id MAA31394 for ; Tue, 15 May 2001 12:18:47 GMT Message-ID: <3B011EA3.5234DB81@imagination.com> Date: Tue, 15 May 2001 13:18:43 +0100 From: David Groves Reply-To: david.groves@imagination.com Organization: Imagination Ltd X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.73 [en] (Win98; I) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: questions@freebsd.org Subject: Using PC's as X Terminals Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG 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