Just thinking out loud. Review: some hospital or clinical situation donated a shelf full of Thin Clients, to Goodwill. I scored 5 that work (one was fairly bricked). 3 Wyse's, a 10ZiG and one Neotek. From 300-ish Mhz to 1.2 Ghz, from 128 MB RAM to 512 MB, all with video outs. They're fairly wiped clean,and just for kicks I tried some recovery software to see what they deleted LOL Nothing left. Cool.
But they either left IPs in the connect software or that's the way it is with Thin Client. I don't know. IPs that start with like 10 or something. I tried to change them to 192.168.x.x stuff and it almost seems to connect to other machines. Using Damn Small Linux on pendrive (tnx Gravelrash), they'll definitely do web.Half of them are Windows CE and they're not so happy about easy networking.
In my feeble, workstation-oriented wire-connected mind, today I had the big
aha! moment, the idea to leave the IPs as-is on the Thin Clients, and set a spare router to whatever those IPs are. Have a poor man's server upstream of the router. So you fire up a Thin Client, the network connect dialog comes up, and click on it, something special happens. Maybe it's like TeamViewer and controls a nice, fast computer. Maybe an owncloud-type media pool opens up. I dunno.
WinCE has about 5 different client methods I could remember, one being Citrix. Trying to remember. Too bad it's so late and I'm off to bed, but it's food for thought, if a bunch of clients are set for a certain IP that I could use more as the original network topology but with my own shtick, what then? Does a Domain name matter "offline"? One of the WinCE connect methods gets cocky if I don't put in a domain.
There's two reasons I ask, one, and I've wanted this for years, setup as a mini computer lab. A 5-sided table like we had at a University. An educational table where people could learn some computer basics and have net access. Another scenario is just, workstations that do what Thin Clients are supposed to do. I don't know what happens when you click on a client's connect button to the server! I'm planning on asking my doctor next visit, to show me what that looks like, if he/she'll let me. And if all else fails, just run a light OS on them and like it LOL
Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 03/12/2015 01:37AM by JoeyPogoPlugE02.