Thin terminals for FreeBSD
cpghost
cpghost at cordula.ws
Mon Aug 7 23:11:29 UTC 2006
On Mon, Aug 07, 2006 at 09:19:30PM +0200, Nagy L?szl? wrote:
> 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
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.
> - 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.
> - Are there any pitfalls that I need to be aware of?
Locking over NFS is a bit buggy. I had some trouble running thunderbird
and firefox, as they seem to hang on some thr_*() call, and gconfd can
be a bitch too over NFS, if the permissions on an NFS-mounted /tmp are
not set correctly (/tmp as md ramdisk is fine though). No other known
pitfalls here so far.
> 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.
>
> Thank you
>
> Laszlo
Regards,
-cpghost.
--
Cordula's Web. http://www.cordula.ws/
More information about the freebsd-questions
mailing list