[geeks] an idea (gig-ethernet)

[jodys at helluin.org]

On Tue, May 14, 2002 at 05:54:41AM +0000, Kris Kirby wrote:
> I just had an idea, a twist on the thin-client + no moving parts theory..

Well I'm with you there, I think xterminals are a frikkin godsend.

> 
> What would it cost me to build a PC (including special motherboard) that
> could netboot over gigabit ethernet and a host motherboard for the machine
> at the other side, connected by a fiber loop? I need particulars about the
> fiber line (one or two, can I do my own, etc.) and the cards, etc.

I'm a little confused here, what is the fiber loop connecting? Do you mean
GigE fiber (I'm out of my league here). I don't think netbooting GigE
is that hard, so I don't think you'll need a special motherboard. Probably
the NIC will have some flash that you can load some netbooting code into.
So if you work it right (no cpu fan, fanless powersupply, no floppy, LCD), 
you can truly have a solid state xterminal (sweeeet!). Taking a gander
at a random GigE NIC (3com) it seems you can netboot them pretty easily.

Reading some more, does GigE fiber provide anything more the copper
besides longer runs?

> 
> I'm looking a building a little (for relative terms of little) netboot PC
> that is small, fast, and diskless -- an X-terminal on uber-steriods.
> gig-e, at 125MB/s, should be fast enough so that I don't need a hard
> drive, and can *maybe* support fancy graphics (to a certain limit).

Well 100Mb ethernet is really fast, the only problem is big bitblits.
So maybe GigE would make things reasonable. As for fancy graphics, 
doesn't OpenGL allow you to use a remote pipeline (running the 
computation on big CPU, displaying on big pipeline connected by
ethernet or something else)? 

If your doing a straight xterminal, disk access over NFS is meaningless
once you get your Xserver loaded (unless, god forbid, you start
swapping of NFS).

It also depends on the apps, if your graphically intensive stuff
is not terribly CPU intensive (playing movies, video games), you
could run those locally on the xterminal (in which case GigE 
would help a lot with disk access).

Take a look at www.ltsp.org, which is a nice setup for xterminals
(and you could probably get it to use a real computer to boot from).

Sounds cool, wish I had some dough to make a GigE xterminal, and
hide the computers away in a rack so I don't have to hear them.

Jody
> 
> Rip it to shreds, guys. :)
> 
> --
> Kris Kirby, KE4AHR          | TGIFreeBSD... 'Nuff said.
> <kris at nospam.catonic.net>   | IM: KrisBSD | HSV, AL.
> -------------------------------------------------------
> "Fate, it seems, is not without a sense of irony."
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