Re: headless PCs
- From: robertharvey@xxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Thu, 25 Oct 2007 03:39:03 -0700
On 24 Oct, 23:27, Znep <E-0C001302-285...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
I vaguely recall someone a while back talking about a PC that can run
"headless" and all from NVRAM- was it in here?
I built a router/firewall from one of these:
http://www.mini-itx.com/store/?c=2#p1662
with a CF card connected via an IDE to CF adaptor.
They have since made one with built in card support:
http://www.mini-itx.com/store/?c=2#p1629
I needed to connect a CD drive, a screen and keyboard and mouse, to
install, but after that it ran quite happily without any of those.
The router had an IDE ISDN card (the BT one, actually molished in
trenza) and the motherboard's ethernut port. I stripped down a cheap
cat5 switch and powered it from the IDE drive connector. It worked
fine and non-stop for 3 years, till broadbean came to Lincolnshire.
http://linitx.com/ sell the same hardware, and are penguin
enthusiasts. They also sell some packaged industrial systems with no
moving parts. http://www.mini-box.com is a similar company from the
USA
Boards with the VIA processor have been, in the past, problematic to
boot from off-the-shelf linux distros. The mix of supported
instructions mean that the default kernel will propbably not work.
It's easy enough to compile a kernel for it, but that means a little
work. I ran mine off a 386 version of red hat, and loaded suse 8.3
and mandrake 2004 with no problems, but suse 9.0 and fedora would not
boot because of assumptions about instruction sets. I don't know what
the current situation is, mind. Do a web search for "c_mov bug"
There is a linux forum on the VIA site: http://forums.viaarena.com/categories.aspx?catid=28
but they are now dominated by discussions of the video drivers and
mpeg decoders that were not relevant to my old box.
I also built a cluster of four 1Ghz epia boards and another cheap cat
5 switch. The bottom one had a disk drive, and the other 3 booted by
tftp from it, and mounted the bin directories by nfs. I built it as a
plastic tower, with LCD screen for a lid. I used it to run
folding@home, and gave it to the local secondary school where it seems
to have died or been stolen. It used a single 150W psu, and a diode
array on the power-up lines out of the motherboards. The electric
only went off when all four 'shutdown' commands had been executed.
.
- Prev by Date: Re: Oh the pain
- Next by Date: Re: Oh the pain
- Previous by thread: Re: headless PCs
- Next by thread: Re: headless PCs
- Index(es):
Relevant Pages
|
