remote mol-sessions with X-windows or vnc.

[Brian Ruth]

> Like it says there that the x-windows display in mol needs a 100Mbit
> connection to run remotely because it just streams the whole display
> across the network with no compression. Is this so, and is there any
> way of working round this? (The intel server and hub is 100Mbit, but
> most of the x-terminals only have 10 Mbit cards)
> Would vnc be a better solution here?

Well, I have an old IBM RS/6000 machine, which has a 133 MHz PPC604e
processor, and a 10Mbit network card. It run Linux, and I use MOL to run Mac
OS 9.2 and 10.2 on it.

Locally, speed is fine in 9.2, and acceptable (relatively) in 10.2. I also run
remote MOL sessions on it across the network. Although you'd ideally have a
fast network, it IS useable via X and a 10Mbit network, just a bit slow.

VNC seems a lot faster and more responsive, but is also more unstable on MOL -
changing colour depth, for example, seems to crash MOL.

> Is there any way the intel server machine could take some of the load
> off the ppc/mol-machine or off the main network ? (it has a spare
> 100Mbit ethernet card which could be connected direct to the ppc
> machine)

Probably not. You could put 100Mbit card in the X terms, though - PCI 100Mbit
cards are really cheap nowadays...

> Also, they have a spare iMac which doesn't get much use at the moment -
> would this be fast enough to test this system before they went ahead
> and bought a faster server machine?

Yes - actually, it's a pretty good idea to do so. You'd need to install Linux
and MOL on the iMac, then try using MOL across the network (it'd be the
network, rather than the iMac which would be the bottleneck) and see if you
think it's useable.

Bear in mind, though, that if you're going to be running multiple MOL sessions
on one PPC server, you'll need a LOT of memory...

Brian.