Diskless client

[g-man]

Gang, I am looking for some real world experience as it relates to a diskless client. I am looking at getting a mini-itx with adequate ram and a CF for the drive. I only push SD through my sage system at the moment and have both an MVP and a dedicated pc for placeshifting. I was thinking that if the MVP can do this, why can't a diskless board with a CF do the same?

I know that I could just order MVP's until I am blue in the face to do the same tasks, but I am not a fan of limited and/or single purpose devices like an MVP. If I get the itch to change things around I want to have the flexibility that a mini-itx offers.

I run a beefy dual core box as a server so I have no problems with power from the back-end I just want to change things up a little on the front-end. My initial thought is to run a slimmed down OS like PE or possibly something from the linux variants.

All thoughts and comments are welcome.

[mayamaniac]

What is CF? Compact Flash?

What is the purpose of a diskless client? If it is noise, you can go with a solid state disk drive as most netbooks do.

[Fuzzy]

You should be able to set up a mini-itx as a client fairly easily. WinXP runs just fine on compact flash, and there are plenty of tutorials out there on how to do it.

One note to point out though, the cost of a decent Mini-ITX board, RAM, case, PS, CF Card, CF Adapter, etc rapidly approaches/exceeds the cost of an HD200, and I'm betting the HD200 would be a much smoother experience.

[mikejaner]

Originally Posted by Fuzzy

You should be able to set up a mini-itx as a client fairly easily. Win95 runs just fine on compact flash, and there are plenty of tutorials out there on how to do it.

One note to point out though, the cost of a decent Mini-ITX board, RAM, case, PS, CF Card, CF Adapter, etc rapidly approaches/exceeds the cost of an HD200, and I'm betting the HD200 would be a much smoother experience.

Win 95?!?!?!!?! Seriously? I hope you meant XP runs just fine on CF, which I would recommend doing.

[Fuzzy]

yes, i did... It's late...

[cenwesi]

How would streaming HD over to the Diskless client work??

[mikejaner]

Originally Posted by cenwesi

How would streaming HD over to the Diskless client work??

A "Diskless" client has storage like any computer with a hard drive, just it doesn't involve spinning disks. Actually, to clarify, the "Diskless System" g-man, is referring to possibly building, is probably not your idea of a diskless system, where there is no drive, and it boots over the network etc..... Either way, Streaming HD shouldn't be a problem, as the hard drive is not used for playback on a client. Hard drive activity during the playback of an HD stream on a client windows system, is probably coincidental and related to OS activity.

[Fuzzy]

network booting would work on a linux client, and would definitely save on some dough, if you are interested in going that route. Windows, On the other hand, is not very netboot friendly.

[cenwesi]

Network booting was what i was thinking of......Maybe someone can answer this for me... if i setup a PXE ubuntu client on my AMD server. i know i can network boot say a C7 cpu pc. Will i be able to watch a HD movie on this pc?

[Fuzzy]

HD MPEG2 would probably be no problem (depending on the video hardware in the system). HD MPEG4/AVC or VC-1 on the other hand would probably cause you problems. A newer atom or ion based board might be more capable, but I cannot guarantee that.

[cenwesi]

I thought booting off the network, the server is doing ALL the job and just sending screens over to the pc that requested the PXE boot?

[Fuzzy]

no, network booting uses ROM program to mount a network drive as a boot drive, and a local ram drive for workspace, and boots the mounted volume. All processing is done on the client, all software is run on the client, just the files are stored on the server.

What you are thinking about is called a thin client, where it loads up less than an actual OS, and all it is is a terminal client. That would NOT work well, and would not make sense to use in this case.

[cenwesi]

Thank you for clearing that up.