[geeks] an idea (gig-ethernet)

[Kris Kirby]

On Wed, 15 May 2002 jodys at helluin.org wrote:
> 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.

Two pcs -- the host (gateway, etc) and the client.

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

No RF noise. I can make a uber-shielded PC and connect the client to the
6' rack of PCs and have them RF shielded as well. Low / no noise.

> 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)?

Having done X over 100Mb, I'd do gig-e.

> 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).

8-) Swapping over gig-e. :)

> 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.

That's the idea. My real PCs aren't quiet. And I could really dig not
having to hear these things.

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