[K12OSN] Network boot hangs

["Terrell Prudé Jr."]

Barry R Cisna wrote:
> Peter,
>
> You did not mention if these machines have onboard nics,or added in nic
> cards & what brand they are? I would guess this old of machine has an
> add in nic card. Some of these old of machines with onboard nics are
> actually isa based nics. This may be your prob as well. Regardless. try
> finding someplace to grab either any model  Intel pci,or better yet
> realtek 8139 pci card (can be bought for $2.50 ea.USD) and I bet your TC
> machines will boot alright.  The realtek 8139 cards are the 'easiest'
> working nic cards i have run across.Way back we used these by the many
> that had the rom socket and burned rom chips to etherboot them this way.
>
>   

3Com 3C905's of any vintage also work very well in EtherBoot mode.  
That's mostly what I use, along with one Realtek 8129.

> And I'm sure the performance will be plenty satisfactory for someone
> wanting to do web browsing with these machines. This is the specs we
> used when we first started into using k12lstp and they worked out plenty
> good.
>   

I still have one Pentium-I MMX computer around, and it's a great thin 
client.  I can play full-screen TuxType on it with no slowdowns.  Same 
for full-screen video.  Why?  Because it's got a good video board 
(Matrox Millenium G400 AGP) and 100Mbps Full-Duplex network card (3Com 
3C905 series).  Both of these points are very important for performance.

My fastest thin client is an AMD K6-2 running at 450MHz with 256MB 
DRAM.  Otherwise, it's equipped the same as the Pentium I.  Also works 
great.  A third client runs an ATI Radeon 7500 AGP video board--not 
quite as fast as the Millenium, but still good enough.

The Pentium I has a SoundBlaster 16 ISA video board.  The K6-2/450 has 
an Ensoniq AudioPCI.  Both work great.

Unless you're running apps locally, you do not need a lot of CPU on your 
thin clients for K12LTSP 5EL.  That's one reason I'm sticking with 5EL 
for a good, long time, at least on my production network.

--TP