Date: Tue, 15 May 2001 13:18:43 +0100 From: David Groves <david.groves@imagination.com> To: questions@freebsd.org Subject: Using PC's as X Terminals Message-ID: <3B011EA3.5234DB81@imagination.com>
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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.
--
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