I know it's not a laptop but, We recently started looking at some of the new Sun Netra T1's they are fast, 1u high, come in 110AC or 12 (maybe 24 I forget offhand) volts DC. They are real workhorses and perform great for the size and all. If you configure it with low memory (sun gets a lot of cash for their memory) they are pretty cost effective. I know that valinux has some small 2u boxes but don't know if they have any dc versions. Derrick I don't work for sun. In fact I would like to see a generic version of these I could run BSD on.
-----Original Message----- From: owner-nanog@merit.edu [mailto:owner-nanog@merit.edu]On Behalf Of Jerry Scharf Sent: Thursday, June 15, 2000 1:08 AM To: Bennett Todd Cc: nanog@merit.edu Subject: Re: Laptops as servers?
One thing I know to watch for is periodic battery replacement. It turns out that running a laptop with a battery in it with AC on all the time will slowly erode the life of the battery. I have no way to know how long you can do this before the batteries won't do what you were expected. Maybe a battery replacement every couple years is all it takes.
The other is that the I/O on laptops sucks compared to PCI. For things that aren't major traffic handlers (like your DNS and DHCP examples) this is not a hit. Do any of the O/Ss out there get full rate out of a 100bT PC card?
jerry