[afnog] looking for Box with several ports.

[Brian Candler]

On Thu, Jun 01, 2006 at 01:21:59PM +0000, Mamoudou Keita wrote:
> I am responsible for Traning centre with short budget. My idea is to have
> several (15)Terminals connected to one
> Windows 2003 Server in to traning Room.
> 
> I want to be able to get access to windows server desktop from my terminal
> (screen, Keyboard, mouse) and use
> application available on server.
> 
> So, I am looking for a box for each terminal that has several ports : one
> ethernet , 1  screen port, 1 Keyboard port,
> 1 mouse ports.
> 
> Terminal (Screen, Keyboard, Mouse) will be connected to the box and each
> box through ethernet will hooked
> Windows 2003 server  through the to switch.
> 
> Any idea ....

This is what is often called a "thin client", and you may be able to get
some useful pointers by googling for that term, e.g.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thin_client

You may be able to find manufacturers who sell devices specifically as thin
clients; however I think you will be better off building them yourself by
scavanging old PCs, or by buying the cheapest possible motherboards and
cases. The end result might not be as small or neat, but will be very cheap
to maintain, and avoids tying you into one supplier. You configure them to
boot off a network server using PXE, and boot up to a point where they can
act as remote desktop clients. The RAM and CPU requirements are very small.

The thin clients themselves don't need to run Windows at all; they can run
Linux or FreeBSD, using rdesktop to talk to the Windows server.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------
$ cat /usr/ports/net/rdesktop/pkg-descr
Rdesktop is an open source client for Windows NT/2000/2003 Terminal Server,
capable of natively speaking its Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) in
order to present the user's Windows desktop.  Unlike Citrix ICA, no server
extensions are required.

WWW: http://www.rdesktop.org/
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

(there's also grdesktop, a GNOME frontend to rdesktop)

Googling around I found this:
http://www.2x.com/pxes/

You might also consider trying one of the run-from-CD-ROM distributions like
Knoppix or Freesbie. If they already come with (g)rdesktop then they may do
the job. You can balance the additional cost of a CD-ROM drive on each
machine versus not having to set up a PXE boot server.

HTH,

Brian.