Linux Terminal Server Project - Fat Clients

Fat Clients

LTSP v5.x added support for a thin client type known as "fat clients". With the advent of inexpensive, relatively powerful computer hardware, the idea to run applications locally on the thin client while offering the manageability of a thin client solution became a reality. In the case of a LTSP fat client, the root filesystem is not a rudimentary chroot but a full Linux installation as a chroot. The fat client uses LDM to authenticate to the LTSP server and mounts user home directories using SSH and FUSE. The local CPU and RAM is used on the fat clients, which provides a few benefits.

  1. the LTSP server does not suffer from users abusing resources and affecting the performance and availability of the LTSP server to other users
  2. multimedia and 3D applications perform better and utilize less network bandwidth

LTSP is unique in offering the ability for a computer to mount its root filesystem over a network and run applications locally. On the Windows platform, the closest equivalent solution is to use a technology like Intel vPro to run a client-side hypervisor and mount the root filesystem image using iSCSI.

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