[KLUG Members] Notes from purchase of little diskless box from a1scs computer sale.

[Dirk H Bartley]

On Wed, 2003-04-23 at 09:16, Bruce Smith wrote:
> > Thought some on the list might be interested in the progress in an
> > attempt to get a mini diskless host up and running.  It's a visara 1783
> > thin client workstation.
> > 
> > http://www.visara.com/Products/ThinClients.htm
> > 
> > It contains a cyrix 233 processor with a heat sink only, so no fan
> > noise.  It has one pci OR isa slot available for an adder card.  On the
> > motherboard are all the standards like paralell/serial/usb/ ethernet and
> > vga.  It also has one IDE connector for hard drives and cdroms, but no
> > place to mount or connections to power them.  It looked intriguing so I
> > paid $25 for one of them from a vendor at the show.  He said at the time
> > they had a bunch of them.
> 
> > I had it at home for a few weeks when I gave it a whirl.  There was an
> > existing operating system that looked very x-windows-ish.  It would
> > recieve an ip address from dhcp.  The installed os had a few clients on
> > it for mainframes (not telnet) and citrix.  All other settings were
> > password protected so I could not change any settings other than through
> > dhcp.  It had a QNX4.x format on it when I got that far.
> 
> Running Linux on this is very cool, but what does it do "off the shelf"?
> 

Off the shelf it had what "looked" like a mini linux disto with a
browser, ica client and a couple of (not telnet) terminals.  I could not
configure it at all because the configs were password protected.  The
Ica client looked a couple of years old so it would not suprise me the
original owner decided to discard them because they upgraded thier ica
server or some odd reason like that.

The long and short of it is that out of the box these used boxes are
relatively without value.

> Would it be a working replacement for a X-Terminal?

My guess is that with a little bit of work, an X terminal distro could
be installed onto the diskonchip.  I won't say that I understand the
specifics enough to define the difference between an X terminal and an
ltsp client correctly though.  Getting the ltsp client going is as easy
as loading the grub firmware onto the diskonchip and then configuring
grub with the correct lilo bootable image from
http://www.rom-o-matic.net

With my hard disk with the recompiled kernel, dos partition, and dos
utilities from m-systems, setting up 20 more as ltsp clients would be
easy, probably about 15-20 minutes a piece.  (mostly rebooting time) 
The same would be true after one was successfully setup as a firewall. 
The next 20 would take about 15-20 minutes a piece.  

Especially from a size and power utilization standpoint, these units
have are intriguing and have alot of potential for firewalls and ltsp
clients.

> We have a lot of 
> X-terminals at work, and if these would do the same thing, it could save
> us a lot of money at $25 a piece.
> 
> I'd like to try Linux/LTSP working on one, but I don't want to spend that
> much time for every one, considering the number of X-terminals we have.

Setting up ltsp is getting easier, especially with a little networking
knowledge.  Once the client is configured the server is 

1) download and install 4 rpms from ltsp.org

2) install tftpd from disk 3 of bsware

3) enable tftpd in /etc/xinetd.d

These are the harder ones, use of thier scripts is recommended

4) configure dhcp correctly to tell it where to get the kernel (the
examples and scripts really help here)

5) configure lts.conf (the documentation here is on the website)

6) configure gdm (this is my beast due to lack of gdm experience)

It comes with scripts to help you do all of these things.

There is good documentation on the ltsp.org website.  Having already
done it once before, doing it Monday night only took me about an hour.

Dirk