Thin terminals for FreeBSD

[Erik Nørgaard]

Chris Shenton wrote:
> cpghost <cpghost at 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.

Have you enabled any swap? Of course, swap over nfs is not desirable,
but it's preferred over running out of memory. I have forgotten the
details, but basically you create a swap file of the required size like this

  # dd if=/dev/zero of=/path/to/swapfile bs=1k count=64k

(to get 64MB) and mount that. Note, that if you have more diskless
clients, then each must have it's own swap. Also, currently, by default,
memory fs's are created for /var and /tmp if you use 6.X, using up your
RAM. Try tuning that, and create a link /tmp -> /var/tmp to save space.

Cheers, Erik

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