[Sussex] LINUX on Mini-ITX / Via?

[Steve Dobson]

Hi

On 10 January 2003 at 08:50 Geoff Teale wrote:
> Neil "smudgey pixels" Ford wrote:
> > I have to say I like the look of the Linitx box with 3 NICs and IPCop 
> > on Compact Flash as a nice neat firewall solution. No moving parts 
> > except the fans.
> 
> Yup.. fom parts its perfectly possible to build these things without the
> fans.  I like the idea of diskless nodes booting from Compact Flash.
Netbox
> advocate this for office desktops - they recommend using LINUX the old
> fashioned way (One _fat_ sever and a bunch of cheap, diskless nodes
running
> XServer as clients) - they try and sell this idea on their website
> http://www.netbox.co.uk/netbox/html/networking.htm .  I think it's
something
> people should push more - why go for an expensive full PC on every desk
> option when you can play to UNIX/LINUX's strengths instead?

I use to agree with you, but having working here for a while with a Web
server
based GUI I don't any more.  My major complaint is performance, or the lack
there
of.  If to many clients are connected the server can run slow, either
because
the CPUs are overloaded, or because of a bottleneck of a particular resource
(disk,
network, ...).  The other problem is a single point of failure (or even more
expensive hard-/soft-ware for fail-over).

Don't get me wrong, I do like the client/server model, but it needs to be
applied
with full knowledge of it's use; and the server needs enough resources to
provide
a reasonable response to the user.  I think this model works well for
applications
but not for personal computing resource.

> They certainly would make a stylish alternative to something like Suns
> SunRay1, 100 & 150 thin clients - the only problem being that Netboxen are
> rather pricey (though they are stylish and well built).  That said the
price
> of the sun thin client boxes seems to have risen recently (Steve?).

I can't say that I am currently tracking the prices of Sun kit (or any other
hardware for that matter).  But price is another issue here.  What's the
delta
between the thin client and a full x86 PC these days?  Give the volume of
x86
systems and the discounts companies buying large number get I would suggest
that the x86 system is cheaper.

The problem that need to be solved here is the administration one.  It is
far,
far easier (and cheaper) to admin on central server, and this cost saving 
may (I only say may) make the thin client a cheaper solution.  But if we
could
find a way to centrally admin a number of remote systems then we could have
the
best of both worlds:

  1). an easy to admin central pool of system, and

  2). the power of a full system on my desk dedicated to doing my work.

As you mentioned Sun, I remember they came up with a system a few years back

called cashefs.  A central file server hosted the "disks" of the remote
clients.
Each client had a disk, but it was just a cache for the centralised data
store.
The performance figures I saw showed almost the same performance as a
stand-alone
system, and was significantly faster than "standard" diskless nodes.

What also impressed me about that set-up is that an older and slower system
(SPARC 5) could support up to 10-15 faster systems (SPARC 20s).

I have of course ignored in this my biggest bug bare in these centralised 
set-ups.  As a developers I sometimes need more control over my box than the
standard plebe user.  But then I know that I (we developers and SysAdmins on
this list) are different and have special needs ;-)

Steve