F1 Checkin Via Thin Clients

One again I'm actually finding a legitimate use for Twitter.  For several months I've been thinking more about using thin clients (embedded XP in particular) for our checkin kiosks ... especially as we're planning on 3 multi-site campuses going live this fall.  Why?  Very small, draws little power, image is locked down to a flashed memory state but is fully functioning windows XP.  Ian over at COR blogged about their use of HP XPe thins for Arena checkin not so long ago which got my wheels spinning again.  I also knew Fellowship Church was using XPe WYSE terminals for F1 checkin but I hadn't followed up with the IT crew there about it for over a year.  So I fired up Twitter and asked about F1 checkin on XPe ... a short while passes and taadaa ... here's Mo Murray's email reply:

Jason,

Good afternoon, I heard thru the Twitter-vine that you were wanting some info about using F1 on XPe.

I'd be happy to tell you my experience.

We installed F1 on Wyse V90L 512MB Memory 512MB Ram Part Number 902141-01L It works with the Elo touch screens out of the box, that was nice.

To get things installed you just enter the admin mode on the V90 disable the write filter (more on that later) Reboot Install Pre-req for F1 (.net, plug in printer ect ect) Install F1 Reboot Log in as admin add "user" to the admin group log in as user, test.

if it's working log out

log in as admin

check clock settings (important)

if all is well, re-enable write filter, reboot and your done.

The write filter if you have not used it, is just a feature that WYSE has on the XPe clients that once enabled locks the system at it's current state.

So even with user as a local admin it can't do too much damage. When the system is power cycled it is restored to the state that the filter was enabled.

This is cool because it makes trouble shooting quick and easy, does it have power? does it have network? reboot. 99% of the time that does it. Down side to this is updates (although they are few and far between on XPe) F1 updates you must touch the system (log in as admin, disable write filter, reboot, update F1 reboot, re-enable filter, reboot) and if the clock gets off you have to go thru the same hoops to do an update to adjust the clock for it to stick.

It's not bad, in my opinion it's much better for total cost of ownership to have the XPe clients than full blown windows boxes. They are fast, never had to rebuild one because it was "slow". They just worked.

WYSE does have a way that you can build one image and have all the clients network boot from it so updates and such are more manageable, or you can use the imaging software they have (free) to do a Ghost style image to the systems. It can be done remotely so you don't even touch the systems just from an MMC tell the ones you want to update to reboot to a new image. This took some playing around with to get it to work (use an old P3 whatever for this and have it be a dedicated box).

But thats the nuts and bolts of it.

We had one hiccup with the front end that Terry Chapman made getting the Elo button to calibrate the screen to work but took less than an hour to resolve that.

If you have questions or would like to talk over this on the phone feel free to give me a call. Feel free to share any of this on your blog also I'm all for sharing of the knowledge.

Thanks for sharing Mo!  Now to narrow down which hardware vendor to go with - WYSE, HP, other?  Wonder if we can get some demo units to try from these guys?  Of course a requirement for us is units must have a PCI slot for our Proxim wifi cards.  Any other XPe hardware vendors you'd recommend?  Anyone else doing F1 checkin with an XPe unit?

PS ... yes, there is a lot of noise on Twitter, but it's nuggets like this that keep me using it.  My Twitter RSS feed for those that wanna follow.

Comments

[Jason Shiflet]

According to Mo, you can get a demo from Wyse. For HP, Mo's suggestion is to call Terry Chapman.

[Erik]

Jason,

I have quite a bit of experience with the Wyse v90 thin clients. If you have a spare one, you can update that, take an image with Wyse's Rapport software and then push that image down to the individual thin clients, so you really only need to touch one for system updates. F1 might require you to touch every one, I'm not familiar with that program. The Wyse clients are pretty nice though. A little pricey, but nice.

E