Sumo Thin Client

I lost my third FreeS/WAN POS box last month. (it became very flaky)

But, I got another P4-4GB ram system, and moved disks around. I put a dual PATA controller in, as the MB has only a single PATA channel.

Machine is “grouper.sandelman.ca”, and it’s in trout’s old tower case. I’ll be moving some of my various <1GHz boxes into it as guests. I hope that the electrical savings will justify everything, but I had to replace the dead system anyway. Hopefully I can split the CPU between running UML tests and spamassassin…

I move the dead POS box’s 80GB drive to it. I had some minor problems getting a new enough ‘insmod’ under debian root that could load the xen modules. (I hate modules.. and why bother for base xen devices, like xennet…?????)

Anyway, the machine is back up. I’ll be bridging the second ethernet to my service network… so the Dom0 will be on one network, and won’t actually be on the network that most of the guests are on.

I got a: http://wmltd.co.uk/index.php/products/sumo_thin_client

and hooked it an LCD monitor in our mud room. It runs VNC over 802.11 to Meaghan’s desktop. They installed ipsec in it, but they missed a couple of scripts, so it is not running over IPsec yet. I’ll be addressing that issue as soon as I finish extracting their build environment.

(Yes, of course it runs Linux)

The speed with x11vnc to send her actual desktop over the wire isn’t great. Probably, I’ll be creating a XenU guest for her, and maybe just run xvncviewer on her desktop as well.

It also has a browser (dilo), and an SSH client.

The Sumo’s price at just over 500CDN needs to get 50% cheaper before it becomes a no-brainer for a spousal/offspring system. I got a roll-up USB keyboard.. spillproof against Liam.

It needed a USB keyboard, I had none. The local store had few USB keyboard offerings that weren’t wireless keyboard/mouse combos. I realize that the wireless mouse would rapidly get carried off by Liam, and lost in a toy box, like the VCR remote did.