Topic: SME on a laptop??

[Texasboy]

Has anybody loaded SME 6.0 and up on a laptop? What were your experiences? I am finding that a good 400mhz laptop can be purchased for around 200 dollars. A laptop has allot of advantages for my customer base. The unit is small and can fit anywhere, it comes with it's own battery backup built in and keyboard and screen are always available. So I just want to know the pros and cons of running SME on a laptop and is their anything I should avoid?

thanks
Texasboy

[gatox]

Here is why I would not run SME on a laptop:

a. NIC driver issues, do not forget that SME v6.x is based on RH 7.3 (major concern)

b. Laptop will need to be running 7/24 if SME is used a departemental or firewall server

c. Would require 2 NICS if used as a gateway.

d. Laptops are not built to run 7/24 for long periods of a time (by design they are made to be mobile, frequent shutdowns and restarts, not to be left running days at a time).  

Everything depends on how critical or level of uptime you are looking at.

Hope it helps,

Luis

[jackl]

Hi Texasboy,

I tried that quite a while ago, i think I had problems with the pcmcia sockets for the network cards.
I also tried the laptop in a docking station with two nics and also had problems with that configuration.

Like gatox says

NIC driver issues, do not forget that SME v6.x is based on RH 7.3 (major concern)

I used a Dell Latitude of PII calibre 256Mb RAM and 3com nics all round.

Regards
Jack

[the_mad_prof]

Ok, my $0.02 - I have had Redhat 7.3 running on a Latitude C233ST (I think this is right) with a 3com PCMCIA NIC.  This worked fine out of the box.  SME (to my knowledge) does not have PCMCIA support, quite rightly for the reasons stated above as a laptop would never normally be used a server.  

Some chap managed to recompile the kernel to include this support specifically to run a laptop as a server.  As I recall it was so you could show some bigwigs in your presentation how easy SME was to use by linking two laptops together.  You would need to google this, but it could be on the Esmith website.

Another issue for using a Laptop would be poor hard disk performance and heat, you would almost certainly kill the laptop in months.