On 7/5/07, erik quanstrom <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
i have a $150 (with shipping) va research blue light special^w^w^w
I've often wondered just how inexpensively you could put together a reasonable Plan 9 network. At work, we're buying $150 thin clients from Devon IT ( http://www.devonit.com/ ), the NTA 6020P. PXE booting, no disk. I think the only moving part is the fan. One of these weeks I'll see if all the hardware is supported by Plan 9. The other models use, I believe, flash drives that appear as IDE devices. A half-gig of flash and there's an auth server with one moving part, for something under $300. So now fileserver. Ideally, it would be nice to do something similar and just attach it to a storage array, either directly or indirectly. So, maybe another box just like the auth server and a handful of Coraid EtherDrive eval kits? So, maybe three boxes at, say, $750 total, maybe another $150 for a monitor, keyboard and mouse. We need some crappy 8-port switch for $50. Let's continue the dirt cheap theme and go a couple of 80 GB drives striped for the bulk of the filesystem and a 200 GB drive for the venti arenas for $200 in drives. So, we're looking at a relatively slow but relatively proper Plan 9 network for about $1,250 plus the eval kits (which Erik and Brantley will smuggle out for us), plus another $300 per node, without recycling any used gear. Assuming you could survive on an 800 MHz terminal. Leveraging used gear, you could probably pick up dying Dell PII/PIII laptops for $150 a pop easy and start from there. Plus, laptops have their own UPSes and come pre-dropped. ;) -Jack
