Re: [9fans] keys broken after reboot?

["Jack Johnson" <knapjack@gmail.com>]

On 7/5/07, erik quanstrom <quanstro@coraid.com> wrote:
> i have a $150 (with shipping) va research blue light special^w^w^w

I've often wondered just how inexpensively you could put together a
reasonable Plan 9 network.

At work, we're buying $150 thin clients from Devon IT (
http://www.devonit.com/ ), the NTA 6020P.  PXE booting, no disk.  I
think the only moving part is the fan.  One of these weeks I'll see if
all the hardware is supported by Plan 9.

The other models use, I believe, flash drives that appear as IDE
devices.  A half-gig of flash and there's an auth server with one
moving part, for something under $300.  So now fileserver.

Ideally, it would be nice to do something similar and just attach it
to a storage array, either directly or indirectly.  So, maybe another
box just like the auth server and a handful of Coraid EtherDrive eval
kits?

So, maybe three boxes at, say, $750 total, maybe another $150 for a
monitor, keyboard and mouse.  We need some crappy 8-port switch for
$50.  Let's continue the dirt cheap theme and go a couple of 80 GB
drives striped for the bulk of the filesystem and a 200 GB drive for
the venti arenas for $200 in drives.  So, we're looking at a
relatively slow but relatively proper Plan 9 network for about $1,250
plus the eval kits (which Erik and Brantley will smuggle out for us),
plus another $300 per node, without recycling any used gear.  Assuming
you could survive on an 800 MHz terminal.

Leveraging used gear, you could probably pick up dying Dell PII/PIII
laptops for $150 a pop easy and start from there.  Plus, laptops have
their own UPSes and come pre-dropped.  ;)

-Jack