Re: Cheap hardware X-terms?

[Harry McGregor <micros@azstarnet.com>]

On Tue, 21 Sep 1999, Doug Loss wrote:

I am in the middle of upgrading the network at corbett to support Xterms
(turning the P90s with 64MB of ram into xterms).

This has involved the purchase of two (soon to be three) 24 port 10/100
switches (we are going with switched to the desk, 10Mbit for now).

We will be using the etherboot bootproms (some of the 3c509b cards don't
have boot prom sockets, so we will use floppies on them), with a network
file system.

The systems were donated, and the hard drives are dropping like flies
(they are the 635-1GB range).  We are viewing this as a solution to a
continuous replacement of hard disk drives.

The app server will be a dual PIII 450-600 (depending on price at purchase
time), in a rack mount case.  It will have 1GB of ram, and a 10GB IDE hard
disk drive for swap space.  It will boot over the network itself.  The
app server will have three 100Mbit nics, and will do IP masq for the
clients connecting to it.  One Nic will connect to the pair of switches
for the lab, one will connect direct to the disk server, and the third to
the outside world.

The disk server is a dual PIII 450-600 (so that if one fails the parts are
identical, it's way over kill though), with 256MB of ram (on 1 dimm),
three segate elite 47GB scsi hard disk drives, and a DPT raid controler
card (4MB ECC cache).  The disk server will have three 100Mbit nics, one
connected directly to the app server, one connected the lab switches,
and the last one to the outside world.  The disk server will server NFS
(on for the app server, and the lab/network boot), Apple talk and samba to
the rest of the school. 

The systems will grab their kernel with TFTP, and use bootp for ip
configuration (DHCP is not supported by the linux kernel at this time).
The root FS will be over NFS, and the Xserver will load localy (over nfs).
All applications will load on the app server.

This is being based off of what my ISP uses for it's tech support reps
(they have a FreeBSD box, with a floppy boot Xterm setup on the reps
systems), using a PII 350 and 256MB ram it easily supports 20 instances of
netscape, plus other things (only about 128MB used by programs).

I am trying to build this to last 5 years.



			Harry

> I'm sure you're right about a local load of the OS and X-server, Ray. 
> Do you set these X-terms up to use DHCP to get their network settings? 
> If so, I'd think you could come up with a standard install that would
> work on every machine with no need for local configuration.  If one gets
> screwed up, just drop another in its place and rerun the generic install
> on the bad one once its problem (I'm thinking hardware here) gets
> resolved.
> 
> -- 
> Doug Loss                 The difference between the right word and
> Data Network Coordinator  the almost right word is the difference
> Bloomsburg University     between lightning and a lightning bug.
> dloss@bloomu.edu                Mark Twain
>