[Sussex] LINUX on Mini-ITX / Via?

[Neil Ford]

On Friday, January 10, 2003, at 09:29 AM, Steve Dobson wrote:

> 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).
>
[Apologies with the crappy formatting, fighting with OS X's Mail.app at 
the moment :-) ]

The last thin client installation I did was admittedly with Win 2K and 
Metaframe, so the resource requirements were quite high, but we ran 
five load balanced servers for these very reasons. Each was 
specifically under utilised so that in case of failure we still had 
capacity for all the clients.

In a business critical environment, taking out all the users in one 
fell swoop is never a good thing.

Neil.