Date: Thu, 17 May 2001 01:38:49 -0700 From: "Ted Mittelstaedt" <tedm@toybox.placo.com> To: <david.groves@imagination.com>, <questions@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: RE: Using PC's as X Terminals Message-ID: <006701c0deac$cba36c40$1401a8c0@tedm.placo.com> In-Reply-To: <3B01C094.204FB92B@imagination.com>
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And a Win32 Xterm, even a free one, is not an option? What if the Win Xterm code is contained on a floppy? This I guess I don't understand the most - your superiors want to be able to use these systems part time as Xterms, but they aren't even willing to put a free Win32 xterm program on them? What gives? Ted Mittelstaedt tedm@toybox.placo.com Author of: The FreeBSD Corporate Networker's Guide Book website: http://www.freebsd-corp-net-guide.com >-----Original Message----- >From: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG >[mailto:owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG]On Behalf Of David Groves >Sent: Tuesday, May 15, 2001 4:50 PM >To: questions@FreeBSD.ORG >Subject: Re: Using PC's as X Terminals > > >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 > To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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