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Date:      Wed, 9 Aug 2006 10:25:51 -0400
From:      "Ansar Mohammed" <ansarm@gmail.com>
To:        "Chris Shenton" <chris@shenton.org>
Cc:        Nagy L?szl? <nagylzs@enternet.hu>, freebsd-questions@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: Thin terminals for FreeBSD
Message-ID:  <768631270608090725j3b0fafbdo4d982ff8981564c8@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <86hd0mdm86.fsf@Bacalao.shenton.org>
References:  <44D79242.3050108@enternet.hu> <20060807231202.GA9552@epia2.farid-hajji.net> <86hd0mdm86.fsf@Bacalao.shenton.org>

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the EPIA's look nice but cost too much.
For comparable performance you can retrofit an old netier XL2000 on ebay
with a laptop hard drive.
They are small, fanless and come with an AMD 400-450 Mhz proc.
They usually go for about 10$ on ebay. You need to get an internal laptop
IDE cable and a laptopn hard drive...

they also support netboot! So yo dont really need the hard drive,


On 8/9/06, Chris Shenton <chris@shenton.org> wrote:
>
> cpghost <cpghost@cordula.ws> writes:
>
> > I'm using EPIA 5000 mini-ATX boards with 512 MB RAM, diskless booting
> > from an NFS server. They load X.org and everything else on demand.
> > Compared to local HDDs, there's a small performance hit when loading
> > programs [and those boards are not the fastest, though 100% silent ;-)],
> > but users here are happy enough with them.
>
> Ditto: I have one of these in my kitchen and like it -- no sysadm,
> silent, etc. Not the fastest but mine is 3 years old.
>
> Only problem I've noticed is if Mozilla (or whatever) uses all the RAM
> then X11 restarts, losing your sessions.  Doesn't happen all the
> time.  One day I'll set up swap to run over the net.
>
> I really like the fact that I install stuff like Mozilla and other
> software on one box (the server) and its immediately available around
> the house on the rest of the boxes. The less sysadm I do the better.
>
>
> >> - Do I need to use gigabit ethernet? Or is it enough to use a normal
> 100
> >> Mbps wired network? I heard that there can be bandwidth problems when
> >> using many terminals, but I do not have experience.
> >
> > For a diskless setup, 100 MB switched on the client side is enough; but
> > you'd definitely prefer gigabit ethernet on the NFS server.
>
> I'm using switched 100Mbps ether but I only have the one diskless
> client. I have a couple other clients mounting just some of the
> filesystems over the net and would prefer GigE but it's not bad as it
> is.
>
> I'd definitely do this diskless thing if I had 10-20 client terminals
> to set up, like in an internet cafe or something.  If they get wedged,
> who cares: just power-cycle them.  :-)
>
>
>
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