Quote Originally Posted by garyng
Quote Originally Posted by JPWhite
This concept is appealing I believe to corporate road warriors. At my place of work we have at any time 10-15 of our customer reps onsite. They all have laptops they access remote systems with across broadband internet we provide. One major pain in the A** for all of these guys is what to do when their POS laptop gets corrputed and won't boot. They go days without email or mainframe access while their laptop is shipped back to their overworked/understaffed IT department to rebuild Windoze. When they get it back it they have invariably lost loads of data, because we all know that end users *always* backup their local data

I beileve there is a market for your product to companies that have certain people on the road all the time. Even if their laptop breaks physically, they can beg borrow or steal a computer in the interim while theirs is repaired. It would be very cheap for them to have a few LiveOS Cd's in their baggage to ensure they have access wherever they go.

I would concentrate on making sure your package includes easy to access (via icons) to features like VNC, Remote Desktop Connection, Citrix (is that available for Linux?), Cisco VPN client (Avaliable for Linux?) and other remote access tools. One potential stumbling block is the lack of IE and ActiveX that some of these guys depend on for coroprate portals.

I believe you should also provide companies with ability to buy your server end software (for a decent fee) so they can host it themselves. Many companies will be unwilling to put their data on a 3rd party server they have little or no control over.

Good project.

Conrad, If you want to persue this opportunity email me at [email protected] and I can let you know names of potential clients you could market your product to.

JP
Out of curiosity again, for corporate users, just setup VNC/Rdesktop server and let the road warriors access it through VPN should solve the problem you mentioned as all that is needed for these road warriors would be a standard notebook that has VNC/Rdesktop client. Why would one use a remote FS which can be slow and not reliable instead ?
Wow, gary, that hurts!. but to get to that point. since the WHOLE operating system isn't run remotely. it is as stable as your cd drive. the webspace that is alloted, is for user config files. IE Desktop settings, and some small files you wanted to save. IE a document or spreadsheet. Speed shouldn't be much of a problem, since the servers are on a rack, that by next week should be going from 5Mb to 10Mb, and up to 100Mb by the end of the month if things really start to pick up. We have 2 servers. one only being an entire mirror of the other, and both servers already have RAID 5 setups. I am a little bit of a overkill kind of guy anyway. I am sure one server with raid 5 is enough, but we figure if we have 2 we not only did it right, but we would have almost no downtime, as we would just switch ip's, to limit downtime to minutes ifnot seconds.