College gives student IT staff a break with thin clients

What’s the bane of any college intern or work-study employee in a university IT department? Maintaining and troubleshooting PCs in a student computer lab.

It’s a pretty daunting task if you think about it – all those PCs with unimpeded ‘Net access, each with gigabytes of hard disk space for piling viruses, Trojans and porn. Recently, Jamestown Community College in New York decided not to torture its IT student staff anymore and went with a Linux-based thin-client deployment from Neoware.

Neoware is a maker of thin client appliances. These appliances are diskless terminals with processors that boot up from a centralized server and run applications and access storage over the network.

Jamestown Community College deployed Neoware thin clients in its library and two computer labs, replacing older PCs in those facilities that were becoming expensive to maintain.

The thin clients also allow the school to roll out new applications more quickly because software can be deployed centrally on a server instead of on hundreds of machines. The system is more secure as well, according to the college’s IT staff, since the diskless thin clients prevent students from downloading viruses or

Trojans that can sit quietly in the background on a PC and cause trouble.

The Neoware thin clients are based on an embedded version of Red Hat and can be configured through server applications. The hardware includes a 10/100M bit/sec Ethernet port and dual USB ports for adding peripherals or other input devices.