>On 03-Jan-00 John A. Maier wrote:
>> Anyone doing this at another facility?  What is the max load of
Xstations   
>> you can hang off of a given server?
>> 
>> I'm looking at 3-5 X/NetBSD stations off of a PII-300 w/ 128 MB, see   
>> reasonable?

In a past life, I worked in a place where we had a rack of 200Mhz Pentium
Pros with 128MB RAM. Two of them did double duty as NFS server and "desktop
server" for 4 desktops each. Each desktop (a PC running Win95 and Starnet
X-Win32) sat on an engineer's desk, and displayed at least one emacs and a
few xterms. They seemed to perform admirably with room to spare. All our
network was 100Mbit, btw, which was a bonus back then, but is pretty much
the default these days...

If your desktops are running Win9x anyway, you may want to look into
running VNC (http://www.uk.research.att.com/vnc/) instead of a true X
server. This requires more memory per user on the main machine (since the
actual X server is running there), but is free, and has the advantage that
you can reboot the client PC without losing all the windows in your X
session (they reside in a virtual framebuffer, and are simply redisplayed
when you restart vnc on the client).