Management Toolkit

Custom thin client slashes IT costs

Mike Walton Tech Republic

Published: 09 Oct 2003 16:00 BST

When TechRepublic member Ron Nath wanted to save his small company big bucks, he blended low-cost software, used laptops, and thin client technology into an efficient, effective system that's easy to support and inexpensive to maintain.

The 100 or so employees at Nath's company work on used laptops, running only a minimal Linux installation and free remote-control software. To run business-productivity applications, they connect to both Linux and Windows 2000 application servers via the Internet and the remote-control software.

According to Nath, this solution saves his company thousands of dollars in equipment and software licensing per user. Here's how they're doing it.

Ad hoc yet reliable thin client
For starters, Nath converted all of his company's servers over to Linux, except for one Windows 2000 server used for running legacy Windows applications. There was nothing too unusual about this move, as Linux has been a favourite money saver with network administrators for years, and this switch was an obvious and easy way to for his company to cut costs, Nath said. The unique part of this system is Nath's approach to his company's laptops.

On each laptop, Nath installed Tiny Linux (with basic networking for connecting to the company network), a dial-up connection for access when away from the office, a minimal X server, and a VNC client.

Using this configuration, end users connect to a virtual desktop on the company's application servers, which all run VNC server. From here, the users have access to any application they need, mainly StarOffice.

"This way, our users can connect to their [virtual] desktop from anywhere in the company, at home, or on the road, as long as an Internet connection is available," Nath said.

"The VNC client provides a nice stateless connection to a VNC server session running on our Win2K server and Linux applications server," Nath said. Each user has accounts on both servers in case they need to run the legacy Windows applications.

Because neither business applications nor user data are stored on the laptops, if the machines break or are stolen, no company information is lost.

For the few times when employees do need a full "fat" client on their machine, the company has several Windows 2000 Professional laptops that employees can take to trade shows, conferences, or wherever.