We've retired our previous LTSP server after 8 years in daily service and replaced it with a significantly more powerful server.
We were able to then - for quite possibly the first time in Switzerland - conduct a comprehensive downgrade of all the clients on our workspaces.
As the previous server is still in good shape, we will find another meaningful purpose for it.
Our new server has been christened 'pingu'. Pingu has also been 'revamped' and has previously been used for a few years. Pingu, which now serves as a Xen hypervisor, is equipped with two quad-core Xeon CPUs and 20GB of RAM. The LTSP server, running as a guest on pingu, has been allocated 12GB.
All heretofore clients with Pentium 4 or newer CPUs have been reserved for more demanding use and were replaced by clients based on Pentium II or Pentium III CPUs.
Nevertheless we can get our work done more efficiently than before, thanks to our more optimized usage of our server resources, thanks to our switch from KDE to LXDE, even though the number of workplaces has doubled compared to before. Thanks to our glass fibre connection to the EWZ fibre network in Zürich and the sensational FIBER7 offer from Init7, we've now upgraded our internet connection speeds to full-duplex gigabit, a 20-fold increase to our bandwidth. In the coming weeks and months we'll collect further experience and realize several new projects that have been in planning for a while now: We can already connect most printers and scanners directly to clients, use multiple monitors and add hotpluggable hard drives to clone and wipe data. For our next project, we'll be tackling Voice-over-IP telephony and remote desktop support using Jitsi.
We will be publishing more information and guides in our wiki under the LTSP category.