[ltp] Which used Thinkpad?

[Brad Langhorst]

Malcolm Dean wrote:

> In your opinion, which old used Thinkpad model would be best for this
> purpose? I need several low-cost, portable servers for classroom purposes.



in my opinion if you need servers - don't use laptops...
I can't really understand why you'd ever need a portable server.
You're going to network the clients anyway so why not get a real server 
and put it in secure location? Spend the extra money on the link between 
the clients and the server room


> - a NetWare 6 Server

wha!? I thought this was for legacy business apps only - yikes


> - a Win2K Server

why? samba probably does everything you need from win2k


> - a testbed for various Linux/UNIX distributions

if you need to test different distributions I think you should use a 
fast desktop machine so you can quickly cycle through the various 
distributions.  Or just skip the testing and go right to Debian ;)

Don't buy a machine to try out distributions when all you need is 
another hard disk for your desktop machine.


> 
> - Graphics, multimedia, and other fancy stuff are not important

ok - but you've got to pay for it anyway with a laptop...


> - RAM expansion capacity very important (512MB)

why? what are these students doing?  I have that much in one of the 
servers I'm involved with  but we analyze large scientific datasets and 
desktop RAM is cheap.

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.

I'd upgrade the RAM if there was any need - considering that it costs 
only 30 bucks for 128M - but there is plenty of headroom in this machine.

You could probably put that class of server together with cheap parts 
for under 500$ now.


> - sufficiently "standardized" hardware (for distributions without "smart"
> installation routines or large driver libraries)

I'm not sure what that bit in parenthesis means...  Most drivers are 
handled in the kernel under linux - and you just compile in what you need.
You just want the thing to work right?  Have a look at 
http://www.linux-laptop.net/
to be sure a laptop's hardware is sufficiently supported.


> 
> So which old used Thinkpad models do you think would work best?

390,760,770 ...
probably anything with a pentiumII or so will be more than enough 
machine to do simple file/print serving.


To reiterate - I'd really think hard about you requirement that your 
server be a laptop machine...  You get a much speedier box (laptop hard 
disks are slow) for less money if you went with a desktop type machine.

But if you really do have a good reason to use a laptop as a server 

I think you're right to choose a thinkpad.  They seem to have the best build 

quality and some of the best longevity in the laptop market.

Other possible vendors are dell (lattitude series), toshiba, and 
panasonic (i hear good things about their "toughbook" series).

Oh - one other thing - if you need to you can put two hard drives in the 
770 series to improve disk performance (i've done that).

good luck - sounds like it could be a fun project!

brad






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