A postcard from Linux Expo

[Marty Connor <mdc@thinguin.org>]

Hello all,

This week I am at LinuxExpo in New York City, USA, so haven't been 
hacking Etherboot, but have had a nice time here.

I spoke to several embedded systems and cluster people at the Expo about 
Etherboot.  One popular thing to do these days is for ISPs to rent out 
space on racks for people to put web/mail/ftp servers.  It's a 
high-profit business for ISPs, now that DSL and cable modems are 
squeezing the margins for connectivity products. 

The unit of measure for rack space is called the "U", which seems to be 
about 1.5inches tall or so.  So, you will see people advertising 1U 
servers and 2U servers.  It's pretty amazing to see the inside of the 
box.  It's basically a motherboard, power supply, and peripherals, all 
less than 1U tall.

I was talking to one fellow who had a nice server box, and was using a 
Disk-on-a-chip flash to boot the box, because his client didn't want 
moving parts. I of course suggested Etherboot as another possible 
solution, since all the servers were already networked, he could boot 
them all from a single machine, and save the cost of the 
"disk-on-a-chip", and have no state on the client.  This could allow him 
to be more competitive when building his boxes.  He was quite interested, 
and said he'd check out Etherboot.  He had an Intel eepro100b card in the 
machine, and was very impressed that it was possible to flash the card 
with Etherboot code.

The show had many embedded systems vendors, there was an interesting mix 
of large and small companies.

I made it to New York just in time to see the Linux Terminal Server 
Project (http://www.LTSP.org/) give their talk on implementing diskless 
workstations with Linux.  They use Etherboot for booting their 
workstations, and it was nice to see a talk using the technology.  They 
used a laptop as their server, and a small PC as the client, and it made 
a very effective demonstration.  Congratulations to Jim McQuillan and Ron 
Colcernian on a fine talk.
I look forward to the August LinuxExpo in California.  

New York is an interesting city.  Buildings are so large, I got the 
feeling of being very tiny in comparison.  People seemed to be everywhere 
in the city.  I walked a few  miles to get a flavor of the city, got some 
honey-roasted cashews, and was amazed with the giant electronic displays 
in Times Square.  I found the people in general to be very "alive" and 
direct, and it was easy to read their intentions.  Boston people tend to 
be less direct, so it was somewhat refreshing to have animated 
conversations with cab drivers and waiters and feel safe that no feelings 
would be bruised.  (it was also fun to watch Jim McQuillan eat a 6 pound 
lobster at dinner on Thursday night! :-)

There were many book publishers here, and as I am writing a book on 
implementing thin clients, I was interested in what they had to offer.  
The amount and quality of information available about Linux and 
open-source software seems to be increasing very nicely.  There seems to 
be real value in good documentation, this should only increase as Linux 
becomes more prevalent in the workplace. I also forsee a sharp rise in 
the number of sys admin positions, and technologies such as Etherboot 
will allow them to be more efficient.

So that's it for now.  It was an interesting trip, and I look forward to 
the next conference.  Seeing applications of open-source technlogy is 
quite refreshing.  

Regards,

Marty

---
   Name: Martin D. Connor
US Mail: Entity Cyber, Inc.; P.O. Box 391827; Cambridge, MA 02139; USA
  Voice: (617) 491-6935, Fax: (617) 491-7046 
  Email: mdc@thinguin.org
    Web: http://www.thinguin.org/


===========================================================================
This Mail was sent to netboot mailing list by:
Marty Connor <mdc@thinguin.org>
To get help about this list, send a mail with 'help' as the only string in
it's body to majordomo@baghira.han.de. If you have problems with this list,
send a mail to netboot-owner@baghira.han.de.