Date: Thu, 21 Dec 2000 01:45:29 -0700 From: Wes Peters <wes@softweyr.com> To: Mike Nowlin <mike@argos.org> Cc: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Re: keeping lots of systems all the same... Message-ID: <3A41C329.6E3C1EFD@softweyr.com> References: <Pine.LNX.4.21.0012200233410.32584-100000@jason.argos.org>
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Mike Nowlin wrote:
>
> I recently made the decision to upgrade all of our net-booted X terminals
> to full-blown workstations. (Basically, adding a hard drive and some
> memory.) Having 19 people running Netscape remotely on our Alpha is
> sucking up a gig of RAM and almost two gigs of swap, not to mention the
> "normal" things the Alpha has to do...
>
> After fighting off (quite violently, I might add) the top-level
> management who wanted to "just give everyone a Windows 98 machine - I
> never have any problems with mine at home...!", I came up with the
> following:
>
> -- Celeron 700-ish, 100Mb FXP, 20G, 64 or 128M, S3 or ATI Rage video
> -- NIS for uname/passwd auth - any user can use any machine
> -- /home mounted via NFS off a master file server for the users' files
> -- everything else (with whatever exceptions I find) on the local HD.
> -- (suggestions???)
>
> The users will basically need to be able to run X w/Gnome, StarOffice,
> Nutscrape, and (the huge, resource-hogging app) telnet.
Figure 32MB RAM for FreeBSD & X, 64MB for Netscape, and 64MB for StarOffice.
If you want to run both Netscape and StarOffice at the same time, 128MB
isn't enough. Sigh.
If your users have a "usual" work position, you may way to place their home
directory on that machine. Export all the home directories and mount them
on the other machines using amd. This does make the amd configuration differ
from machine to machine, however.
WindowMaker feels much more snappy than Gnome on limited CPU resources.
I'm not sure a 700 Mhz Celeron really qualifies, though.
Durons are cheaper and faster than Celerons, though the motherboards may
more than make up the difference in price. FreeBSD runs quite nicely on
Duron and Athlon systems based on good motherboards.
Good luck, and write an article about it when you're done. DaemonNews would
be happy to publish it. ;^)
--
"Where am I, and what am I doing in this handbasket?"
Wes Peters Softweyr LLC
wes@softweyr.com http://softweyr.com/
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