| That works pretty well on Linux systems, where you can simply remote mount (usually NFS) your home directory. For Windows, what's actually happening is that your user profile is getting copied to the system. Which is why logging off takes so long -- the profile is getting copied back to the server. Do this on an underprovisioned and busy network, or worse, one on which work cycles are highly synchronized (e.g., students, in standard class blocks, over the course of a day), and where account profiles can grow without limit (at one point I had tools to ID and prune large profiles), and things go all to hell. The Linux / Unix model actually can be quite useful, and it isn't too dissimilar from my own initial experience: console logins to the campus Unix network from dumb serial terminals (precisely zero local state). Sun Microsystems did some work with this (in conjunction with their own hotdesking workplace experiments) as well. The downside is when you're doing highly compute- or data-intensive work, in which case the amount of information transferred across even NFS links becomes problematic, and/or you need to provision some really beefy servers. At that point you likely want some sort of shared batch compute resource. Again, more easily accomplished under Linux/Unix than other platforms. |