Hi,
I'm socializing with this idea of mine...
Long time ago, I worked with mainframes only. Then with what we called
'mini-computers'. What was different was (among a few other things :)
that you didn't have a *Personal* Computer on your desk. You shared the
computer with other users.
Now, having gone through the cycle of working/living with DOS, Win32
(fortunatley, I haven't yet seen Win00) and OS/2, I'm running Linux on
most of my computers at home.
Linux is (by definition) stable. Makes sense to keep it running.
My wife is, let's say, not _enthusiastic_ about leaving the PCs running
24/7. Me and my kids would love it though, but since we are in minority
(4) against my wife who is in majority (1), the PCs are all shutdown
over night. (If you're married, you'll understand. If not, you'll have
to wait until you see the light. ;-)
My idea: (This is the 'good old days' part.)
I'd like to leave all the PCs running in the basement. 24/7. And have
only 'dumb terminals' in our sleeping rooms, living rooms, hallways and
in the kitchen. (The bathroom?) Log in using any (free :) terminal and
you're on the LAN. Maybe doing all the login on one dedicated PC having
NFS mounted hard disks/CD/floppy etc. from other PCs. Maybe even some
kind of load balancing cluster, all in the basement. No CPU, no harddisk
and (*most* important) no ventilation fans making noise at the point of
login. Except(!) one PC somewhere accessible where I would run two
(four?) floppies, and a few CD-ROMs. One small boot disk only.
Could someone enlighten me about what I would need to create the part
titled 'dumb terminal' in this solution?
Guess I'd need some monitors, keyboards and mice, but how do they
communicate (over distance) with the PCs? Do I use some kind of modems?
What kind of modems? Can I use ordinary PC equipment to do this?
(Looking forward to have multiple video cards under XFree 4.0.) Can I
serve multiple sound cards from a shared PC to dedicated 'login points'?
Using a multiplexor in the living room to serve multiple monitor setups?
Any hints, experiences and additional ideas (as always) much
appreciated.
Regards
Gustav
P.S. I now. I might find myself sleeping in the basement one day. But
what wouldn't I do for my Linux boxes? :-)
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