Windows login on LTSP Thin Clients

Incited by the success of our Linux-based noiseless thin clients we were highly motivated to further increase the benefit of these clients to our users.

Today, we are happy to announce the availability of Windows logins on these machines.

We provide a wiki page collecting relevant information on this topic, the most important items being:

  • The Windows login on your thin client has to be enabled by us, please contact us (phone 32668)
  • Use CTRL-ALT-F7 and -F8 to switch between Linux and Windows
  • You have to reset your password once on our password page before Windows logins work

Please let us know how you like this service.

For the technically inclined: the base of the setup is a full-screen rdesktop window on a second X server (:8) connecting to a Windows Terminal Server 2008 which itself gets its user data from our Active Directory. The hardest part of the setup was the synchronization of our user accounts from our OpenLDAP server to the Active Directory. For the brave of heart we have documented the lunacy we encountered.