Thin Clients and wireless

[wesleyw]

I am looking to use Thin Client technology on our wireless mobile classrooms as a way to better use the available bandwidth in our school. With many wireless access points only allowing a small number of logings concurrently even though they state 30+ concurrent connections this is a problem I'm hoping to overcome with the thin client technology available. However as wireless is a little flaky we'll need to check that our chipsets will be supported by the thin client OS we choose has anyone thought about doing this?



Wes

[Uraken]

we had problems implemeting wireless thin client as the ip address wasn't given until drivers had loaded (i think) i binned it the end.

[plexer]

How would a thin client solution help with your bandwidth over fat clients? surely x amount of thin clients getting everything they need over the wireless as apposed to x amount of fat clients on getting docs etc... would be worse?

Ben

[Geoff]

Yes, that's what I was wondering. Thin clients are in constant communication with the server(s) where as fat clients will only go to the network when they need a document/web page/etc.

[wesleyw]

Sorry haven't really explained we have wired fat clients but there is to be an influx of mobile labs and I don't believe the current wireless system is good enough to handle the amount of traffic without being made into thin clients.

Wes

[wesleyw]

Yes but the amount of data sent over a thin client connection would be relatively small?


Wes

[wesleyw]

Also the main issue has been the time for the logins we have only managed to get 8 clients to login simultaneously whereas with thin clients this should not be a problem. Even without the roaming profiles et cetera it still throws one when you try to concurrently login more than 8 per WAP device so I thought I'd add some 1gb wireless cisco wap put in the thin client system and hopefully this would sort it out.


Wes

[CyberNerd]

Citrix uses about 20kb/s and any network problems will be exacerbated on a TC network.
Personally I'd wire the classrooms, whilst it might be technically feasible to do this over wireless it will ultimately be a PITA.
Wireless is designed to support a wired infrastructure not replace it.

[plexer]

I'm sorry but I don't think what you are trying to do is going to improve your experience of wireless I can only see it becoming worse a well desinged and managed wireless network will support more than 8 concurrent users.

Ben

[wesleyw]

Yeah the load balancing and other options have to be re-configured I think looks like its back to the drawing board. Oh well!


Wes

[Ric_]

I do exactly this... 30 laptops set up with a simple icon on a Windows XP desktop to log onto the Citrix farm.

The bandwidth used for thin client communications is negligable compared to the bandwidth used to log on, download a profile, open up a document, etc.

I auto-logon the notebooks after a pre-logon connection to the wifi network purely for printer management and the like but you don't even need to do that.

Another option is to buy purpose-built devices such as the Neoware m100 thin client notebook ( http://www.neoware.com/mobility/index.html ).

[wesleyw]

Can this be used with things like Precedence ThinIT client? How does it stand up to use from say MS Publisher Ric_?


Wes

[Ric_]

As long as you get a basic 'shell' OS operational that is capable of running your ICA or TS client and has the wireless drivers loaded, you should be fine.

I have only ever used Windows as the client OS on the laptops... because the laptops came with Windows licenses and I needed to be able to run the Data Harvest data logging software locally on the machines.

As for running Publisher, it runs fine... it's running on a dirty great big terminal server elsewhere in the school after all. Ass to why you would want to run Publisher in the first place... now that's a different question!

The only way that I can see you having a problem is if your wifi is prone to interference and drops out, rather than a lack of bandwidth. The ICA or TS client should reconnect your session though and ICA uses session reliability to try to prevent this anyway.