need some info - read (ammo)

[caveman]

Please - I might use some offending words, but this really
is a technical question.

Where I contract (for now) - the IT? buyers et. al. have
decided to replace the user PC's (800+ all booting m$) with
a screen, mouse and keyboard only ie. terminal server
in its extreme!
(91.25% of the non-mainframe servers are *nix)

When I worked for a hardware vendor in the 80's
we had a saying "some things are for selling, not for installing"

The current workstations run a combination of spreadsheets,
modeling progs (mostly on *nix via X11 tunnels) etc.
(the booted os is un-men$ionable !) and lotsa local modeling tools

Some of the progs pull a 2.8 Ghz machine (2 GB memory) to its knees
for 50-300 minutes or more
Ditto for some of the disgrace (sic) spreadsheets.

Now! - I think this is a move to the wrong side of the track.

Soooo - I need some info
1) where you have used etc. this monster and any comments
2) what are the pros and cons of this

Been on the 'net - but info not exactly what I need
its mostly about how "good" terminal servers are, how it saves costs,
how it distributes Cpu power (40 quad processors) etc.
but very little about the actual conditions and headaches involved.

Am I for or against? - I dunno.
For now - I still appreciate having my own workstation
(be it as a developer) where I can do just about what I want.
The new Idea - I will have NO access to a USB point, cannot install or
modify the environment as I choose, cannot download and install
"tests" - unless it is done via an "installation" system on the server.

Everything is moving back to the 70s and 80s with central systems
and "dumb terminals" and I feel this is a step back, purely
'cause the decision makers are listening to the salesman that
are only there to make a buck!
(Oh yes - and all of this on a VERY fast 100Mb LaN!!! as
the salesman says this is "more than enough")

Any comments are welcome.
If you want to kick this out - any place else I can try
to get some info?

[Void Main]

Terminal servers handle screen updates much better than X11 tunnels. We have a couple of large Sun servers running Sun Rays.



We are about to replace them with Linux terminal server solutions though because we figure we don't need the big iron sun hardware and Citrix licenses when we can do a better job cheaper with Linux. I believe one of the products we're looking seriously at is this:

http://www.nomachine.com/

Also, we still have big iron back end servers (AIX/Solaris/etc) but desktops that the apps will be displayed on are from the Linux terminal server. The apps may be from Linux, Solaris, or AIX. I believe there was another product we were looking serious at too but I can't remember the name of it off the top of my head (it's not my project obviously).

[Master of Reality]

that nx technology is pretty nifty. My ISP is setting up online PCs with it for their clients. They have servers hosted on their fibre network and we login using the free nxclient (which they had to patch up quite a bit apparently).

Not enough CPU to have every user dling through bittorrent clients on the machine, but it works perfectly for a general workstation. I think they're 8 Intel Xeon CPUs with 16GB RAM and i'm not sure how many users (between 50-200). This is running Fedora 7.