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Comment by jonknee | Hacker News Reader

I doubt there are a bunch of user accounts on a uni computer lab Mac, so this wouldn't be much different than regular screen sharing. It's also still a mess to choose which computer to try, doubly so if you're on an outside network.

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Mac OS X Server had (has?) decent support for proper accounts, with the client machines essentially just diskless terminals that boot from the server, and with all accounts on the server - called netboot. So not like screen sharing at all. This worked pretty well in a lab setup, but didn't support remote logins - this sounds much better.

The OP was talking about doing this so expensive university software... I'm going to go out on a limb here and state that it's just not going to work well when 100 students try and spin up instances of AutoCAD or Mathimatica on the same machine.

I doubt there are a bunch of user accounts on a uni computer lab Mac

But they could always just throw a beefy machine in a closet and have it connect to the same network directory service that the lab machines grab their user accounts from.

My old university did the same thing, but did so nearly a decade ago with a Windows terminal server.

Each computer on campus is connected to a user directory, so students can login to any computer with their individual student account. I'm assuming that Lion's multiple login feature will work with networked accounts.

Perhaps, but it's not going to work well to have 100 students logged into the same computer. I think the home example given in the article is a much more likely outcome than a university setting.

That's true, it may have to be limited to 10-20 simultaneous logins at a time (or whatever the machine can reasonably handle), but that is still better than 0. Considering my university has a relatively small student body, this would be definitely be a sufficient solution for us.

Anything has to be better than Microsoft's "Call Our Account Manager To Have Them Explain Appropriate Volume Licensing - Oh You Bought Something Slightly Weird Let Us Pass You Through To The Next Guy Up Who Might Still Fob You Off" licensing methods.

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