Thin Client Computing and the NComputing L230 Client

Thin Client is an area that deserves much more press when it comes to the education market. They are of limited use in high-capacity situations like video editing or multimedia production, but just great for ordinary every day word processing or spreadsheets. They work by connecting to a terminal server and running their user session in that server instead of on the desktop. A distinction here between a computer running a terminal services client, and an actual thin client hardware solution, is relevant. While you can use PCs to connect to a terminal server, if that is all the PC does, then it is wasting space and electricity, making noise and heat, and costing money to maintain and repair. The true thin client has no moving parts and a small physical footprint, uses very little power, is silent and costs much less than a PC to buy new.  They have been available for years from the likes of HP-Compaq.

What NComputing has done is to bring down the cost of these devices (to somewhere near $200) and also to provide their own proprietary terminal server to operate them. The company got off to a somewhat difficult start in NZ having gone through several distributors before Insite Technology picked them up. There are a range of models available. Our school has decided to purchase just one of these terminals to begin with, to run a library OPAC search client. Our library system is .eLM from Contec Data Systems, which is implemented in Jade. This means that it must start up a Jade thin client application in order to provide the OPAC function. I set up Vspace (the NComputing terminal server) for this application on a Windows XP virtual machine under Hyper-V with 512 MB of RAM. The first snag was trying to run the Jade application as a desktop shell replacement for Explorer. The L230 provides such a capability, but its firmware limits the length of the commandline to the point that Jade couldn’t be run this way. After much effort the solution was to use the normal desktop startup setting and use a Group Policy configuration to load Jade as the shell. What actually gets loaded in the GPO is a small custom shell that I wrote myself. It displays a tiny window with two buttons on it and uses it to launch the Opac app. One button opens the Opac and the other logs off. This is necessary because the GPO setting doesn’t quite work like a full shell; when the Opac gets closed, the user just gets a blank screen instead of a logoff. So the little shell gives them the option to log off.

The next little hassle was the autologon and similar functionality. On these terminals you can provide a username and password to log onto Windows automatically. Except it didn’t appear to work. After poking around a bit I found the setting in Windows to turn off the requirement to press Ctrl Alt Del to log on. Then the automatic login was fully functional. There are still a few picky little things to sort out, like how to get the terminal session to close at the end of the day so that backups can occur – or else we might have to switch to Shadow Copy based backup for the Jade database. So far I am not sure I want to give unqualified support to NComputing. Their support forums contain some complaints about the system, and I had to do a lot of extra work because of a firmware problem that their support helpdesk just glossed over. We are continuing our evaluation of thin client by buying some second hand terminals on Trademe to see how well they might work in a classroom situation. I’m also looking at what other schools might use. Some schools in NZ are moving to VDI. We don’t probably have enough computers at our site to justify this unless we replaced all 80 or so with VDI terminals.

Reusing an old Computer Monitor for DVD Playback

This year is computer upgrade year at home, and one of the first steps I undertook was to replace the 17” Philips CRT screen I have owned in the past few years (107S51) with an Acer 17” LCD (V173). Best screen I ever owned. The old Philips sat in the corner and gathered dust, until I decided I wanted a DVD player in my bedroom. But I didn’t have a suitable TV, as the one I have is too old to have video and audio inputs. Here was a chance to put the old Philips screen, which has years of life left in it, to work again. It’s a bit of a challenge with a computer-only display which only has a VGA input, but not insurmountable.

First thing is to change the composite video output on the DVD player into VGA. There are a couple of brands of adapters to do this readily available in NZ. Jaycar sell their XC-4873 at around $120 in their NZ stores. This one has all sorts of wizz-bang features, but its saving grace is that when power is applied at the wall, it goes straight into the composite to VGA conversion mode and doesn’t require any fiddling around. One thing I dislike about this model is the incredibly flimsy composite input adapter cable, which I would hate to break, as although it uses an “MMI” plug, typically seen on computer graphics cards, cables to connect to these seem to be as rare as hen’s teeth. A simpler alternative is the Cypress CM-396, commonly sold in NZ as the Dynamix VC100 for a similar price.

The next requirement is suitable speakers. Having used a number of different models of Logitech speakers over the years, including a set of X230s on my work computer, I chose the simpler and cheaper X210, the satellites of which are seen in the photo above. Compared to the X230, this model has only one driver in each satellite (instead of two), the sub is smaller and downward rather than side facing, the volume control is on the end of a 2 metre cable instead of being incorporated into the right satellite speaker, and there is no bass level control on the sub. Power output is also slightly lower at 25W RMS instead of 30W. Since I paid around $100 for the X230s, I figured that the cheaper price of around $70 for the X210s was an acceptable compromise. The speakers are nevertheless very good value with quite satisfactory sound quality for my taste.

Finally as can be seen above I had to make a shelf for the screen to sit above the DVD player. It would be reasonable to assume that the weight of a CRT screen could be a bit much for the DVD player to support. The shelf you can see is made simply out of 4x2 timber screwed together. Maybe I’ll get round to staining it one day, but for now it is plain. It also serves in this case to hang the satellite speakers on the front using their wall mount feature.

So all up it has cost about $200 to adapt the monitor to its new role. If you have sunk the cost of the monitor then it is cheaper than buying a new LCD TV, and I expect many happy hours of viewing to follow.

The open vs proprietary hardware debate

When I was still at school, most of the early personal computer platforms were proprietary. Apple. Commodore and Tandy were among the big names in development at that time, each with its own hardware platforms developed in house. That soon changed with the development of the PC platform by IBM which became open when it was reverse engineered by a clone maker and IBM lost control of it. Today of course, the momentum of that platform, driven by large software producers like Microsoft and the numerous hardware manufacturers such as HP, Intel, AMD et al, continues unchecked, and long may it last.

Meanwhile, Apple continues as one of a very few developers of a proprietary hardware platform to have got significant market share, although they are now increasing this by diversifying into the mobile device market. Meanwhile a few PC platform hardware manufacturers have proprietorised their offerings as much as possible, especially in laptops, so that they are still software compatible but you have to buy any hardware components needed from the brandname OEM. I have always been opposed to any form of proprietary hardware and remain so today. The vibrant and diversified PC industry that we have today would not exist if the market was controlled by companies like Apple. Competition is always good and breaking this down to the lowest level of PC components as has occurred with CPUs is a good thing. That is the benefit and virtue that we enjoy from having such an open hardware platform in the PC.

A practical example that comes to mind is the printer market. Everyone knows that you can buy consumables from the OEM, or third party production at a cheaper price. Some of the printer makers have tried to lock people into buying only from them, by making the toner cartridges proprietary intellectual property, or attaching proprietary chipsets to them which the printer will not operate without. There is one brand in particular, Lexmark, that according to a Consumer Institute review I read, has the highest running costs of any printer type in NZ. Lexmark just happens to be a company that has aggressively pursued legal action against companies refilling their toner cartridges. For all the arguments we have heard, higher profits are the main motivation for this type of corporate behaviour. However it is Apple that provides the major examples of this type of belief at work in the computer industry today, across all of their platforms. Apple’s primary motivation is bigger profit and they are seeking to build themselves into a bigger player to challenge Microsoft and win ideological battles in the marketplace. They have just invested a large sum into a huge new datacenter in, I think, North Carolina or somewhere, in order to funnel growth in cloud services, probably for the Ipad. If you have got this sort of stupid behaviour from Apple now, what is going to happen when they become bigger? It will just be a repeat of what has happened to IBM and Microsoft in the past, as examples. The US DOJ will start getting interested (they are already sniffing around) and legal action is likely to follow.

One of the interesting paradoxes of open source or open hardware or anything is the potential for growth of a big player on the back of that open platform. As we have seen, Microsoft and Google have built big empires on the back of open platforms (open PC architecture and open Internet standards respectively). Apple now wants to get a bigger slice of Google’s action by using the open HTML5 standard to squash a business rival (Adobe). If you dislike the way Google or Microsoft have grown their businesses on the back of open standards, don’t support Apple to go the same way. One of the virtues of the open PC architecture is that we have the ability to run any software and any OS on it. Anything that can be done on a Mac running OS/X can be done just as good or better on a PC running Windows or another operating system. The Mac hardware, after all, is practically the same as a PC and they are often made in the same Chinese factories these days. The big development these days is datacenters and the open PC platform has driven the development of these through the competitive nature of hardware production. Any innovation you see in Apple’s hardware these days is on the back of the PC platform which they have virtually embraced in all but name. The innovation happened because the open PC platform’s inherently highly competitive nature drove the development. All that’s happening is the ideological rival philosophies being played out in chess games across America. I bet that the only datacenter innovation in the Mac platform has come from Apple itself and has lagged behind the PC platform or basically uses the same PC parts with a little proprietorisation to stamp their own brand on it.

How has the open hardware PC platform benefited schools? It keeps prices down, remember that schools used to pay thousands of dollars to buy an Apple computer, now you can get a range of different PCs at prices in the hundreds, still a lot cheaper than an equivalent Apple especially in the bulk. You can also have choice in operating systems and software. We choose to use Windows because Microsoft’s academic pricing is very good and we only pay for server licenses which comes in at a few hundred dollars for something that is packed full of features and easy to administer. One of the reasons I don’t bother with Linux is that no vendor has got the integration that Microsoft has got with tools that are well supported and easy to administer. This is a huge area where basically Linux vendors have to move beyond the command line and make their systems easy to administer across the whole range of different technologies that are needed to make a fully functional server, and the second thing that has to happen is that vendors have to provide commercial support for these systems. At the moment MS with the deals that the government provides in NZ is simply the way and as we move into more cloud based systems the choice of operating systems in a school will become less important as the administrative burden is transferred offsite. This means the schools have less hardware and direct onsite costs to worry about and are less tied to a particular platform in any case.