Re: Diskless Solutions (Fat Clients) and NFS

On Sun, Mar 8, 2009 at 8:56 AM, Gideon Romm
<[email protected]> wrote:
> Robert,
>
> If you use sshfs, then you need the same authentication in 2 places: the
> server and the client.  If the idea of a fat client is to have
> everything run locally, it may not make sense to have users set up in
> both locations.
>
> Of course, you could easily achieve what you are after with pam_mount in
> the chroot set up to mount an sshfs mount, but you would still be left
> with the above question.

I'm having second thoughts about sshfs. I just read this on a forum
http://lxer.com/module/forums/t/27962/

"Many FUSE filesystems lack functions that are very important for
media collections, like partial file reads. Imagine trying to read the
tags off all your mp3's. That's about 1k per file, tops. With any
regular filesystem (and with NFS) you can simply open the file, read
the first 1K and parse the tags. So for your 1000 song media
collection, you'd transfer 1 MB. With many FUSE filesystems you have
to transfer the entire file before you can start reading: 1000 * 8 MB
= * GB! Not all FUSE filesystems have this problem, but often FUSE is
osed to provide filesystem-like access to things that aren't true
filesystems, like an ssh/sftp connection as is the case with sshfs."

Plus I have heard about kernel context switching introducing latency
with sshfs because it uses FUSE.

>
> Then again, I have never seen David's fat client plugin, and I am not
> sure how authentication is addressed.  If you could centralize
> authentication to the server and not do it on the client at all, then a
> plugin that mounts /home over sshfs makes much more sense.
>
> Of course, as I type, this sounds vary much like what would happen if
> you set:
>
> LOCAL_APPS=True
> LDM_XSESSION="ltsp-localapps /etc/X11/Xsession"
>
> In other words, you simply use the existing local apps infrastructure to
> launch an entirely local Xsession.
>
> Food for thought.

Yes, very interesting idea. All app processes would be subprocesses of
Xsession and hence be local too. Cool. I will try it out. :)


-- 
Robert Arkiletian
Eric Hamber Secondary, Vancouver, Canada

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