[ltp] Which used Thinkpad?

[Tod Harter]

On Monday 24 December 2001 00:04, you wrote:

Honestly, I'd go with a luggable... There are loads of old ones floating 
around. Dolch made some excellent little cases that had a built in keyboard 
and plasma display, with a standard baby-at form factor. They are not even 
all that hefty, being maybe 15 pounds. You should be able to dig up a PII 266 
or somesuch motherboard around somewhere. My brother even upgraded one to a 
brand new lcd display. Its a bit of work, but the result is a fairly rugged 
box that won't tear your arm off. You might consider various "shoebox" type 
machines that show up on the net fairly often too. Most were designed for POS 
applications, etc., but they generally use fairly standard components.

> You might be surprised at how little ram you can get away with and still
> have good performance - 128M should be plenty for file/print service for
> about 30 clients. Linux will use pretty much all the ram you have (if
> you look at the output from "free") but most of that filesystem
> buffering on a lightly loaded system.
>
>
> the following might be of interest to you...
>
> Mem:    175288K total,   107980K used,    67308K free,    38552K buffers
> Swap:   102712K total,        0K used,   102712K free,    41332K cached
>
> this is one of the lighter weight server's I manage - it has 80 gb of
> online storage in a linux software RAID and provides samba file and
> print servicee, streaming audio, netatalk mac file and print services,
> NFS service, CUPS Unix print service, BIND with dyndns for name service,
> light apache web service, light cyrus IMAPd service, and a small mySQL
> database.
>
> all in about 100M of RAM for 40 off and on clients (peak simultaneous
> use is about 20)  It was up 50 days before I updated the kernel today.
>

Dude, you like to have some headroom! I got into an office 4 years ago that 
had an el-cheapo Tiawanese desktop machine for a server. P133, 64 megs of 
ram, and some crappy old 8 gig IDE drive. I set that baby up with RH 7, 
Apache, MySQL, Samba, Sendmail, and Netatalk. It also ran the WAN gateway for 
the office. We had around 10 users at any one given time, and it worked 
GREAT! The machine worked hard all the time, but it never crashed.

Just as a testament to the awesome stability of LInux, the hard drive in that 
machine finally went completely berzerk, trashed half the filesystem and then 
refused to write data at all. The kernel calmly panicked, remounted the root 
fs read-only, and continued on its merry way for another 18 hours, spewing 
error messages left and right to the console, but it never failed to provide 
whatever service it still could (couldn't write files anymore...). 

They tried to replace it with a dual processor 450 mhz PIII box with a gig of 
ram running NT4. I had NT off and Linux on it within a week, NT just couldn't 
cut it ;o). 

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