Power on method of a number of thin-clients from server

Power on method of a number of thin -clients from server

Disclosed is a method that the server switches on thin clients by remote control.

Thin clients such as kiosk are used for several purposes and places. For example, advertizement at stations or at shopping malls.

Within a type of thin clients, there is the terminal that has no storages such as HDD or CD-ROM. In this case, the server provides the capability of storages for the many thin clients via a network.

The thin client terminals are often widely distributed across an area, and the terminals need to be turned on remotely (for example, by Wake-On-LAN signal on Ethernet from the central server to the terminal.) If the server manages the multiple terminals, the power-on sequence needs to be designed to avoid the overload condition of the server by serializing the requests, otherwise the server may run out of memory resource due to the concurrent requests.

This investigation provides the method that makes the load of server flatness by controlling a timing when the server switches on each client with monitoring the transmission rate at the entrance of the server.

The legacy approach to avoid these problems is that the server keeps a fixed interval and switches on each client in order. However, this method has the weak point that it doesn't consider the influence of network traffic variation.

As another method for controlling the power-on sequence, the server takes a trigger message for power-on from each client whose boot program has a special code for sending the signal of completion to the server. This also has a disadvantage that the each client itself needs a special code to notify the completion. This means the protocol for power-on sequence requires the unique handling to all thin client programs and this fact makes difficulty to the system installation because of flexibility requirements.

The figure-1 illustrates the typical example of this investigation.

- N thin clients are connected to a server over a network switch.

- The each thin client receives a boot image by sending a request to the server after the power-on by WakeOnLan triggered from the server.

- The server has to send the boot image to the thin client. That is, it causes a server traffic rise that the sending the boot image triggered by the power-on request from the server.

The server powers on from 1st client to n-th client in order. In this power-on sequence, it mo...