well kept secret out

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ed
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#1 well kept secret out

Post by ed »

One of the world's best kept secrets, until recently.

This is a HP thin client, which can be used as a fully blown music server.

Until about 2 months ago these were selling on ebay for £15-£20. There are various models from about 5 years ago which were prolific in the corporate environment. This model is a T5700 which I bought for £15, but there are similar, or more capable units such as T5720, T5730. These now trade for upwards of £75 now that the capabilities have been discovered. They usually have XP embedded loaded, but some have native unix/linux. Check the RAM and flash memory before buying, more is better.

all models are fanless and most consume about 4 watts, my T5700 is a 1ghz CPU

simply

1. buy a cheap thin client
2. load BSD or freenas
3. load slimserver of squeezecentre or whatever your flavour.
4. Plug into your network and load your musics

I replaced the internal IDE flash memory with an 80gb 40pin laptop HDD which I salvaged from a defunct freeview+ box, but any 2 1/2 inch 40 pin IDE drive will fit.

They are certainly more capable that my hacked buffalo NAS, and certainly cheaper, but you have to factor the cost of the HDD. Probably only worthwhile if you already have a disc. The later models have USB2 so a music library on USB external is also possible. A few people have done this, google is your friend.

edit: If you do fancy a try then unless you are unix savvy you will have to treat it as an adventure..Freenas, because it's BSD based, has a few features regarding mounting windows file systems on a USB port...you have to go native as far as file system is concerned.

BUT..you could also leave the XP system in use usb library..I havn't tried it personally, but I'm sure its possible, but I think you'd need a maximum memory unit.
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Neal
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#2

Post by Neal »

Neat, found a 5720 for £50 delivered...wonder if I can put Vortexbox on it?
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#3

Post by cressy »

hmmmmm when i got made redundant and our building got emptied just before we closed one of my last jobs was wiping everything off, then 'skipping' 143 of those exact units...................all had red hat installed (linux?) and the lot were chucked. just monitors were kept as spares for the companies new hardware at the new site

shouldve offered a quid for em...........
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#4

Post by Neal »

Ooooh, mine has arrived, posting from it now! :D

Installed some 1GB memory from an old lap top to replace the shipped 256MB and its up n runnin'

I have a spare 2.5" drive somewhere so will try and mount it on the lid...don't have a cable though...Ed where did you get the 44pin cable from? Seems a bit hard to find one of suitable length...
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#5

Post by ed »

Hi Neal

there seem to be odd sizes out there.....mine came from the freeview box but when I googled a few weeks back there were 6" and 12" available.....I was a bit wary of the split cables when I saw them because they all seemed to have crossovers in the photos.......


Beware that if you take out the flash, were windows boots from, you will have to flash an OS onto the HDD....and that has to be unix because I don't think you can flash XP onto the HDD...at least I couldn't because it kept saying that it wasn't licensed.........If you re-flash windows onto the flash drive it doesn't detect any license problems. I originally had to reflash windows in order to get into the admin account. XP embedded has a few features which caught me by surprise......

Having said all that, you may be able to boot XP from a usb drive.....all the flash loads are available on the HP website.
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#6

Post by Neal »

Thanks Ed. Found a 20cm cable on Ebay...I'll try a full XP install first and maybe try Vortexbox, I've also purchased a cheap USB CD-Rom just in case!
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#7

Post by ed »

way to go Neal, good luck.

the good thing about these thin clients is that you can't 'brick' them like you can with a NAS unit. If you screw up a NAS unit it's a real pain getting it to play nicely again.
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#8

Post by Neal »

Hmmm, I think to start with I'll install the 2.5" drive I have but may also look at a small 5Gb micro drive or compact flash card for the main disk and put my music files on my external USB drive... :idea:
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#9

Post by shane »

I was given one of these little beasties a while ago. Would it do the same sort of job, or is it too out-of-date?

http://www.directdata.net/pdfs/neoware/3000.pdf

It's had a 20GB laptop hard drive fitted, but I've never tried firing it up yet What I'd like it to do would be to plug it into my router with my two usb hard drives attached to run Slimserver and act as a store for photos, documents etc.
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#10

Post by shane »

I just plugged in an old monitor and keyboard, and this is what came up. I know nothing about Linux.

Image
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#11

Post by Neal »

Looking at the spec I don't think the drive and memory aren't large enough so it'll depend on how expandable it is....


Managed to start an XP install on the T5720, slipstreamed SP3 onto an XP image then spent an hour trying to get the CD to boot! faffed about with a USB drive and nearly gave up....it appears only the front USB ports support OS boot :roll: Getting there....
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#12

Post by Neal »

Got the T5720 all packaged up, getting the drive in was a real exercise...nearly put a microdrive in but didnt want to throw any more money at it.

So copied an idea off the web and mounted the drive under the lid.

Lid:
Image

Theres a stud you need to drill out and a few holes to drill for the drive mounting plus some tape to add for insulation...

Image

Image

All pretty straight forward, the biggest faff was the heatsink though, there's no room for the drive without some reduction in height of the graphics 'sink.....so I went from this:

Image

To this :

Image

Cut down to the height of the screws.

Image

Theres a good 10mm gap between drive and 'sink but its still tight for space...

Image
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#13

Post by pre65 »

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G-Popz THE easy listening connoisseur. (Philip)
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#14

Post by ed »

congrats Neal, they are fun.

There is an expansion kit if you manage to find one, which extends the width of the beast by 1 inch. Its meant for the PCI riser so that you can put a PCI card in but it's ideal for mounting a disc.

If you move to linux you can use the usb in audio2 mode and run an offboard dac in 24/192....I reckon the future lies in the past because as your photo shows, these things were around in 2006.
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#15

Post by Mike H »

"grope.thruhere.net" ? :shock:
 
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