Axel AX3000 m70

Thought I'd create a new thread, and put anything I learn in here. I know Geoff is trying out the product, too.

Would just like to say cheers to matstones, had the evaluation unit through the post this morning and am playing with it now.

On the whole I'm impressed. Due to our restrictions with dhcp here, everything has to be done through the configuration file. Luckily this is pretty straightforward so in the space of thirty minutes play time, I've gone from a parcel in my hands to an rdp session into another workstation.

Now it's a case of figuring out how to secure the device to the monitor...

Yep, also evaluated one. Seems to do what we want when talking to our citrix farm. The VESA monitor mounting system looks useful too.

I'll be trying it out with W2k8 terminal services soon too. So I'll let you all know how that goes.

I've had a slight issue with the management software, whereby if I try connecting to the terminal, the terminal itself would throw a wobbly and die. Re-installing the software fixed this though, but was rather strange.

I'm trying to figure a way, short of writing a script in ruby or something, that would enable me to roll out settings files to a number of the machines simultaneously.

Fafster,

This is easy. Setup one terminal as you require. (Ie typically enable DHCP and enter TSE IP address).

Use AxRM to scan network

This will list all Axel devices (the eval in your case)

Right click on terminal and select "Get terminal configuration" and tick button to save to file. This gives you a template config file, which can be modified if necessary but probably no need to)

You can now select a single or multiple other terminal from AxRM and right click and select "Send Configuration file" - specifying template file above. This will send your template to all terminals selected in one hit. Takes about 5 seconds per terminal and can be timed to happen after hours)

Job done.

This does assume the "new" terminals already have an IP address - which at this stage they may not. There are various ways to resolve this.

1) A new 'virgin' terminal will "announce" itself automatically within AxRM - you can click on it and give IP address and send template file.

2) You can configure AxRM to automatically, with no human interaction to detect new terminals and download template config file. (You can of course specify different template files for different terminals - ie you may want staff terminals to attached to different server to students...

To test this with your demo unit, take snap shot of current config and save as file - delete its entry in AxrM as above - set terminal back to factory defaults, (setup/advanced/more/factorydefaults) - and switch terminal on (ie emulate virgin install for terminal and AxRM software)

The terminal will "pop" up in AxRM, click on it, give it a tempory IP address - download config template (which will over-write existing setup - ie delete IP address given above and enable DHCP...

There is lots more AxRM can do - but I don't want to overload the post...

I should have my test unit on Monday - looking forward to it! The simplicity and lack of operating system etc sounds very interesting!

Butuz

Cheers for the advice. I'm going to have a play with that first thing Monday morning.

The postie brought my M70 yesterday. A minute after it was unpacked I was logging into the system on it. What a fantastic bit of kit!

The abolition of a traditional operating system on flash storage in favour of a basic hard coded "bios" type operating system is inspired! I thought our HP Linux/Windows CE thin clients were easy to set up - but the M70 takes the biscuit!

The fact that they include a VESA monitor mount is brilliant too - having these tidily mounted to the back of a TFT with all the cables cable tied up nice is super slick.

Overall - a big thumbs up. They are cheaper than other thin client units, in theory they should be more reliable as there is even less to go wrong. I'll give it 9/10 as there is one area where they could improve on - having a headphone socket in order to pass sound back to the user would be a bonus.

Will take some photos now for you lot.

Butuz

How much do they cost?...Roughly...

Give Axel a shout, he should be able to help.

RRP is £136 + VAT, however I think there's an 'education' deal you can get if you talk to Axel direct.

We do have special pricing for "Educational Establishments" but we can only give RRPs here as this essentially a public forum.

Please send me an email at matthew@axel.com and I will confirm our educational pricing by return.

Reassured you won't get spammed or be subjected to any other form of 'sales pressure' !

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Geoff

I'll be trying it out with W2k8 terminal services soon too. So I'll let you all know how that goes.

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I can confirm that this works.

[MrBurns]Excellent.[/MrBurns]

Thanks to Axel for delivering our trial unit.

I've had chance to test it out and it's the easiest way to get access to our TS server. We're currently testing the water when it comes to thin client so are testing AXEL's unit as well as trying out thinstation with some 5+ year old computers.

One element I've tested is the performance of video (basic video streaming eg. youtube). On my thinstation PC's, the video viewing performance is much better than expected. However, performance was not so great on AXEL's unit. Probably down to the difference in Video RAM. Has anyone else had any experience of using the AXEL unit when viewing basic video streaming? How much Video RAM is on the AXEL M70 unit?

Thanks for the feedback, we are working hard to dispell the myth that setting up thin clients needs to be complicated, and your post is nice confirmation that we are getting it right....

We would not propose thin clients for multi-media applications. As thin clients are essentially all about moving pixels in one direction and keyboard strokes in the other direction, transfering moving images massively increases the workload when compared to more office type applications, which is the market thin clients are currently optimised to operate at...

It doesn't help that sound and vision have to be "realtime" for humans to enjoy so the nature of TCP/IP with collisions and retries, spikes and troughs, while efficient for getting files from one place to another reliably is not ideal for multi-media, where realtime is more important than data integrity

Microsoft don't provide syncronisation between sound and vision - so if you reach a network bottleneck as more users pile in you may lose syncronisation. (Citrix do provide syncronisation).

I am not qualified to comment on Thinstation - the idea to re-use old PCs sounds good on several levels. I would not dispute an old PC has much more memory and CPU than a new thin-client, but I suspect that this would simpy shift the bottleneck away from the TC towards the network or server as more users connect. It would be interesting to know how many Thinstations can concurrently stream Youtube before your server/network reaches saturation and the quality starts to break up.....