So a long time ago I worked volunteer IT for a fan convention. This is roughly mid to late 2000s. Among many other things, I was constantly looking for ways to speed up the registration line. And rather than have reg workers type things in, one way I hit on was to have terminals there for people to enter their own information.
Shoestring doesn't even begin to cover it. Buying computers was definitely out. So I hit on the idea of buying used Wyse Winterms. Winterms are thin clients that talk either RDP or Citrix ICA. These could be had for about $20 a pop on eBay. I would hit local pawn shops, thrift stores and recycling places to get monitors and keyboards to go with them.
But they're just dumb terminals with Windows CE on them. How to actually use them?
xrdp!
I set up a Linux system with xrdp and a bunch of X sessions for the Winterms to talk to. Took a lot of fiddling to get it right. Like I probably spent two weeks in the evenings getting everything right. But even I was surprised how well it worked. With a full-screen web browser in kiosk mode it shaved massive amounts of time off how long it took to get through the reg line.
We actually used that setup for about three years before we had enough money to invest in better hardware. Over that time I'd estimate about 8,000 people used them. But I'll always have a soft spot for those stupid Winterms and xrdp.
I used those same winterms too. The problem was we were then updating our network for PCI compliance and one of the issues we had was our call centre teams used old green screens which were connected to via telnet and there was no way to update these winterms to install PuTTY.
Then I hit upon the idea of using them as even more dumb terminals. So I set up a PXE server that would serve an NFS volume hosting a minimal Linux distro and setting those winterms to boot via DHCP.
Surprisingly those winterms not only supported Linux but ran it really well.
This system ran for several years until those old green screens were replaced with web front ends instead. Which made me sad for two reasons, firstly the end of the PXE solution which works so smoothly, and secondly seeing the old green screen server decommissioned, which was a Sun SPARC box bought in the 90s and had an uptime of something ridiculous like 8 years.
Around the same time a number of us working furry conventions on the west coast had about the same idea, but we noted that many of the terminals of the time had a browser session type, so we ended up using that and web based kiosks for terminals.
These days the same software (now used at a number of conventions) is used with mobile devices and the need for having convention-provided kiosks has slowed quite a bit.
Shoestring doesn't even begin to cover it. Buying computers was definitely out. So I hit on the idea of buying used Wyse Winterms. Winterms are thin clients that talk either RDP or Citrix ICA. These could be had for about $20 a pop on eBay. I would hit local pawn shops, thrift stores and recycling places to get monitors and keyboards to go with them.
But they're just dumb terminals with Windows CE on them. How to actually use them?
xrdp!
I set up a Linux system with xrdp and a bunch of X sessions for the Winterms to talk to. Took a lot of fiddling to get it right. Like I probably spent two weeks in the evenings getting everything right. But even I was surprised how well it worked. With a full-screen web browser in kiosk mode it shaved massive amounts of time off how long it took to get through the reg line.
We actually used that setup for about three years before we had enough money to invest in better hardware. Over that time I'd estimate about 8,000 people used them. But I'll always have a soft spot for those stupid Winterms and xrdp.