costoa
May 28th, 2005, 03:14 AM
As someone that use to work in public education I've seen how little money there is for computer equipment and support. I came up with a variation on a few other people's ideas to minimize both costs and wonder if it's possible.
Imagine a typical four seat (square table with divider, four chairs) computer workstation setup. Normally there would be four computers, four monitors, etc. My idea would be to use one computer with four video cards and three usb hubs, each with an usb keyboard/mouse. The "primary" seat would have it's monitor hooked up to the AGP video card (preferred to save on CPU load) or onboard video, keyboard/mouse on the PS/2 ports and an usb hub by the keyboard (more one this later). This seat would be used for setup and as well as a regular workstation (with the three finger salute disabled). The other three seats would have their monitors hooked up to a PCI video card and have an usb hub by the monitor for the keyboard, mouse and an optional flash drive to transfer files out of the network. A medium end CPU could easily carry the load for four sessions surfing the web or using OpenOffice. CPU time could be equally shared so no one person could slow the other three down too much. Not only would the cost be much lower (my guess is about 65% less) than four separate systems the noise would also be much lower. This entire setup could be done with very common and cheap pc parts.
Now for the support end. There would be no hard drive. Since RAM is so cheap put in 1G or more and make a big ram disk. It would be booted off a special live distro cd but only to copy everything needed over to the ram disk. In theory the live boot cd could be removed after booting is finished. An another option would be to lock the live cd and drive in the case for security reasons. A second cd burner could be added for the user's use. User files would be stored on a SMB or NFS share and could be transfered via a flash drive connected to the usb hub at every seat. USB hubs would segregated for security reasons. The user login would attach them to their file shares and custom user interface settings. If the network goes down the workstation would stay up. If there's no network server then users could store their files on thier own flash drive. If the workstation goes down you would just need to hit the hardware reset switch and reboot. BTW, since there's no hard drive it would make the machine rather secure. The only extra work needed at boot time would be to identify which usb hub goes with which video card. This could be done by having the monitor display it's sequence number and someone hitting the corresponding number on the mated keyboard. An extra 30 seconds of work. Picture one usb hub feeding four usb hubs, one to each seat. A fifth could be added for a printer or scanner.
AFAIK you can assign multiple virtual sessions to different video cards. No shared logins. To the entry level end user they wouldn't know the difference from this compared to a standard GNU/Linux box.
Not that I would support it but this could be used to create four virtual MS Windows "machines" in one box by running rdesktop at startup and RDPing to a Windows 200x Terminal Server. Again, I'd rather not bring MS into this. =)
You could even make four Mac OS 9 machines out of this by VNCing into a Mac box running GNU/Linux and mac-on-linux. Could be slow and most likely would massively violate Mac OS 9's EULA.
The only extra parts needed over a standard PC would be: three PCI video cards ($40 each / $120 total), four usb hubs ($15 each / $60), and three usb keyboards and mice ($30 each / $90) or about $270USD. Add in an extra 1G of ram for the ram disk over the 512M for the system at $40 per 512M stick and the total would be $350 total. You would save buying three motherboards, three CPUs, 3 sticks of 512M ram, three cheap hard drives, three cdroms, three cases and power supplies.
One machine for four simultaneous users with less maintenance than a typical GNU/Linux box. Could it work and would it be a pleasant machine to use? I'm thinking about building a test machine if the feedback is positive.
Imagine a typical four seat (square table with divider, four chairs) computer workstation setup. Normally there would be four computers, four monitors, etc. My idea would be to use one computer with four video cards and three usb hubs, each with an usb keyboard/mouse. The "primary" seat would have it's monitor hooked up to the AGP video card (preferred to save on CPU load) or onboard video, keyboard/mouse on the PS/2 ports and an usb hub by the keyboard (more one this later). This seat would be used for setup and as well as a regular workstation (with the three finger salute disabled). The other three seats would have their monitors hooked up to a PCI video card and have an usb hub by the monitor for the keyboard, mouse and an optional flash drive to transfer files out of the network. A medium end CPU could easily carry the load for four sessions surfing the web or using OpenOffice. CPU time could be equally shared so no one person could slow the other three down too much. Not only would the cost be much lower (my guess is about 65% less) than four separate systems the noise would also be much lower. This entire setup could be done with very common and cheap pc parts.
Now for the support end. There would be no hard drive. Since RAM is so cheap put in 1G or more and make a big ram disk. It would be booted off a special live distro cd but only to copy everything needed over to the ram disk. In theory the live boot cd could be removed after booting is finished. An another option would be to lock the live cd and drive in the case for security reasons. A second cd burner could be added for the user's use. User files would be stored on a SMB or NFS share and could be transfered via a flash drive connected to the usb hub at every seat. USB hubs would segregated for security reasons. The user login would attach them to their file shares and custom user interface settings. If the network goes down the workstation would stay up. If there's no network server then users could store their files on thier own flash drive. If the workstation goes down you would just need to hit the hardware reset switch and reboot. BTW, since there's no hard drive it would make the machine rather secure. The only extra work needed at boot time would be to identify which usb hub goes with which video card. This could be done by having the monitor display it's sequence number and someone hitting the corresponding number on the mated keyboard. An extra 30 seconds of work. Picture one usb hub feeding four usb hubs, one to each seat. A fifth could be added for a printer or scanner.
AFAIK you can assign multiple virtual sessions to different video cards. No shared logins. To the entry level end user they wouldn't know the difference from this compared to a standard GNU/Linux box.
Not that I would support it but this could be used to create four virtual MS Windows "machines" in one box by running rdesktop at startup and RDPing to a Windows 200x Terminal Server. Again, I'd rather not bring MS into this. =)
You could even make four Mac OS 9 machines out of this by VNCing into a Mac box running GNU/Linux and mac-on-linux. Could be slow and most likely would massively violate Mac OS 9's EULA.
The only extra parts needed over a standard PC would be: three PCI video cards ($40 each / $120 total), four usb hubs ($15 each / $60), and three usb keyboards and mice ($30 each / $90) or about $270USD. Add in an extra 1G of ram for the ram disk over the 512M for the system at $40 per 512M stick and the total would be $350 total. You would save buying three motherboards, three CPUs, 3 sticks of 512M ram, three cheap hard drives, three cdroms, three cases and power supplies.
One machine for four simultaneous users with less maintenance than a typical GNU/Linux box. Could it work and would it be a pleasant machine to use? I'm thinking about building a test machine if the feedback is positive.