I found a new crack…
August 5th, 2009Due to the recent economy changes our WSG (Windows Support Group) at work has had an abundant supply of extra computer hardware, especially HP Thin Clients (T5720 and T5730). I am talking about several hundred of them collecting dust and waiting for the economy to recover. My interest in Windows Embedded sparked me to take one of each home and tinker with them…
The first thing I did was to take the thing apart so I can visually inspect the hardware. To my surprise these things were actually pretty decent! The T5720’s had an AMD 1 ghz cpu (upgradeable), 512mb ssd (upgradeable), 512mb DDR ram (upgradeable), and a pci slot. The T5730s have an AMD 1 ghz (upgradeable), 1gb ssd (upgradeable), 1gb ddr2 ram (upgradeable), and a pci slot!
So what can I do with the two thin clients? My first thought was to make a custom xp embedded image that runs IIS/ASP/NET…
The IIS Server
I downloaded the Windows Embedded Standard 2009 Trial and took a stab or two at creating a custom embedded image for the thin client. For the most part, I am able to get around. I havent figured out how to make an image into a binary and flashed to the SSD, but I am able to boot to a USB drive that has Window PE on it, and I can manually move my image to the SSD. The OS is booting and coming up, I can get to the desktop, but haven’t been able to get the IIS/ASP working correctly… Will come back to it later, as for now my attention deficit disorder is kicking in, and I’m off tinkering with another project…
The Source Code Control Server
Like all developers, I have a few personal projects that I work on that needs a Source Code Control (SCC). Although I am a “Microsoft Software Architect” I don’t always do the Microsoft thing. I am one of the few that can actually stand back, analyze the requirement and respect the best tool for the situation. My business requirement is simple:
1. Integrate with Visual Studio.
2. Free (or cheap) client licensing (accessible from the internet, may have a few renegade developers to help).
3. Secure! (See Requirement number 2).
4. Easy to administer
5. Run on an HP Thin Client hardware!
Visual Source Safe:
My first consideration was Windows XP (embedded?) and Microsoft Visual Source Safe Server (VSS). VSS is very outdated, so I worry about security, cost money, and recovering from repository corruption is an issue, however it is very easy to manage! However I decided to pass on it to look for something better.
Team Foundation Server:
Violates and sodomizes business requirement number 5.
Subversion/Linux:
Visual Studio integrates very well with subversion using VisualSVN. I use this combination at work and love it. Linux is very secure will easily run on the hardware, however I am not a linux guru and setting it up, backups and managing it would be an issue.
Subversion/XP:
Usually installing subversion on a windows operating system isn’t easy or preferred. However the guys at VisualSVN also make a VisualSVN Server! They package up apache & subversion and include an easy to use MMC snapin for administrating the repository. By using XP, I can also RDP (Remote Desktop) into the system from time to time to check the health.
Flash and Solid State Drives have a limited number of read/writes. So I decided to cannibalize an old P1-133 notebooks hard drive (2GB) and stuff it into one of the thin clients. This will make IO and space not an issue.
XP or XP Embedded?
Since I am using a normal hard drive, and only have a trial version of Windows Embedded 2009 I decided to go with a full version of Windows XP/SP3 and use XPLite to carve out some of the components that are not needed. I may convert it over to XP Embedded if I can get my grubby hands on a retail/full version of Windows Embedded Standard 2009…. anyone??
stay tuned, pics coming…



