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Originally Posted by Martian
What's your budget? And what are you doing with this box? "Terminal server" defines how you interact with the machine, not what it does. Will it be running services? Loghost? Email? Apache? SQL?
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Budget is $1000 and it will be running LTSP, so basically the Linux equivalent to Windows Terminal Server. Full Gnome desktop to all 30+ connected users.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Martian
To answer your question, as far as I'm aware embedded devices share the PCI(e) bus, so there's no significant difference. Choice of chipset is going to have a much bigger impact than onboard vs add-on. Depending on the application(s) other factors may end up being a bigger indicator of performance. If you expect to have a lot of users, I'd focus on maxing disk I/O rates long before worrying about the network cards.
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Given that I'm already aiming for an i7-capable motherboard, all the chipsets are identical so there is no decision to make from that end. Unless I am misunderstanding you and you are instead referring to the NIC chipset? I also have read that in fact not all embedded devices use the PCI-e bus but some are using other pathways but I cannot find anything other than vague references.
With respect to to disk I/O -- it's already been maxed out by using SSD for the OS and SATA III RAID for data. I don't see how it can get much faster on that front.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Martian
But seriously, fuck that shit. Just order a Dell Poweredge and be done with it. They're quite reasonably priced for what you get, but if you're strapped you can get a used one a year or two out for a good price and still have it be quite powerful.
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Not possible. I just tried to configure a Poweredge to provide similar performance and it cost above $4000. And that's for a new machine. A machine a year or two older won't nearly provide enough performance for LTSP when you've got 30 thin clients attached. If it does, it won't cost $1000 which is what the machine I'm proposing will cost right now.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Martian
Also, I would not use a solid state drive in any application where reliability is a concern, especially without redundancy in place. If you're expecting a lot of activity the drive will wear out quick and you'll end up with a fancy paperweight for your desk.
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SSD for the OS only should be no problem as /tmp and other scratch directories will not exist on it. /home is on the SATA iii drives so theoretically much of the SSD will be read-only and will last a LONG time. And of course backups will exist and a second, older machine will be a synchronized failover machine.
Thanks for your input!