Date: Tue, 08 Aug 2006 09:27:59 +0200 From: Erik Norgaard <norgaard@locolomo.org> To: =?ISO-8859-2?Q?Nagy_L=E1szl=F3?= <nagylzs@enternet.hu> Cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Thin terminals for FreeBSD Message-ID: <44D83CFF.1010502@locolomo.org> In-Reply-To: <44D79242.3050108@enternet.hu> References: <44D79242.3050108@enternet.hu>
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Nagy László wrote: > > Hello, > > I need to setup an environment where some users (10 to 20 employees) > will use terminals to run programs. They need to run a few popular > programs: thunderbird, firefox, adobe acrobat, openoffice and gaim. This > site will be a customer service. We decided to reduce the costs by using > Open Source software and cheap terminal computers. This is a good > solution because most of the users will read messages and images on the > screen and they can share the same processor and memory easily. I know > that I can setup cheap computers and use its X server as a terminal for > another central computer. This solution still requires new (or used) > computers. I would like to reduce the costs to the minimum. Here are > some key questions that I could not answer: > > - Is there a more cost-effective solution? (Something that I did not > think of) > - How much RAM will I need? Will FireFox Thunderbird and OpenOffice load > shared objects and reduce the overall memory usage? Or should I reserve > 256MB of memory for each client? > - 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. > - Are there any pitfalls that I need to be aware of? > > It would be perfect to provide links to some articles or manuals - I do > not need anyone to write detailed instuctions and do my job. I'm asking > for help because the handbook was not very useful in this case. I only > found this: > > http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/term.html#TERM-X > > It does not help too much, and there is no know-how. I really need to > know what hardware I need to buy. Remember that the main cost is maintenance, not the hardware. I think that the way to do it is not dumb terminals in the old sense, but rather sharing disks, while each terminal runs processes separately and have lot's of RAM - 1GB. 100Mbps network should be ok, just make sure it's switched (which all are nowadays), it's only loading the applications that is slow - once up, there is not much on the network when applications run on the client and there is plenty of RAM. I would think that more RAM gives better user experience than faster network. Some recommends booting off a flashrom, but the disadvantage is upgrading the base system has to be done on each client. For example: Buy some mini-itx MB's with 1GB ram. For desktop use, processor is not important, RAM is. So get some fanless MB's. I have found that VIA MB's are easy to work with, support pxeboot, see this site: www.mini-itx.com. Then you need one file server to allow NFS mount of everything. I sat down and wrote about it, but I never got through to have a working diskless with all the bells and whistles, see this article: www.daemonsecurity.com/pub/pxeboot/ Other sources are the pxe and diskless articles in www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/ Cheers, Erik -- Ph: +34.666334818 web: http://www.locolomo.org X.509 Certificate: http://www.locolomo.org/crt/8D03551FFCE04F0C.crt Key ID: 69:79:B8:2C:E3:8F:E7:BE:5D:C3:C3:B1:74:62:B8:3F:9F:1F:69:B9
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