BSD is rather good at running over a network. I don't think you need the terminal server. For something light, you might as well let the local processor do some of the work.
You could netboot the machines, then use NIS or LDAP to share the user database. Home folders would get mounted over NFS. As each user logs in, the machine would mount their home folder, and launch all their apps using their personal settings, no matter which machine they sat down on. You can customize the workstation and speed things up a lot. Use a simple window manager like mwm or fvwm. You can write a common .xinit that will launch the browser, the softphone, and whatever else they need. The menu can be set to only include things they should have access to. I find this is very fast and efficient, and makes it more like an embedded device than a computer. If you don't want to netboot, you could use a CompactFlash to IDE adaptor, and boot from a CF card. Even if you only put the root partition on CF, you can mount the /usr and /var partitions from the server using nfs. This allows you to have a common /usr for everyone (makes software upgrades really easy), and by having an individual /var on the server for each machine, you would have ready access to all the log files on the server. I haven't tried a softphone on BSD yet. There are lots of nice browsers. I'm partial to Firefox, but there are others as well. X-lite is available for Linux - it would probably run fine with binary compatability mode turned on, since it is a self-contained binary. There is also GnoPhone. -Tim On Tuesday 06 February 2007 02:07, Roland Giesler wrote: > In a call centre environment, an Asterisk telephony setup, which would > be better to use with a FreeBSD client? I'm hoping to use an eBox > 3800 (http://www.compactpc.com.tw) with a Via Eden-N processor and > 256M RAM as operator machines. The application is browser based and > we pretty much control the whole environment. > > Questions: > 1. Which softphone is best for this kind of setup? > 2. Should I run a terminal server client (like LTSP / does it have a > BSD equivalent?) > 3. Wouldn't a minimal OS, with a browser and a softphone running on > the client OS be better than a terminal server client? > > Some comments and input would be great. > > Thanks all > > -- > Roland Giesler > Green Tree Systems cc > Stellenbosch, South Africa > +27 (0)72-450-2817 > http://www.thegreentree.za.net > _______________________________________________ > Asterisk-BSD mailing list > [email protected] > http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-bsd -- Tim St. Pierre IP telephony specialist sip://[EMAIL PROTECTED] Toronto: 647 722 6930 Toll-Free 1 888 488 6940 [EMAIL PROTECTED]
pgpoXGmlb2j6K.pgp
Description: PGP signature
_______________________________________________ Asterisk-BSD mailing list [email protected] http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-bsd
