CQC Hardware Question

[CalypsoCowboy]

Dean, are you looking into any type of hardware box controller running CQC, something that had an embedded OS, fanless CPU, no hard disk, no moving parts, etc. and sat in a structured panel vs. a standard pc running the software.

-Josh

 

[Dean Roddey]

We have certainly considered it. But it's a tricky proposition. It has to have some sort of dynamic storage, otherwise it's completley unconfigurable. Basically, it would be a small enclosure, with a mini-ITX MB, and a solid state drive, running Embedded XP probably.

But we've stopped even building our own regular hardware box, giving that business to 2partsfusion.com, because we just don't find selling hardware to be a viable business for us at this time. It takes more time than any money we'd ever make off of it. And everyone wants something slightly different, so we just find it better to allow hardware people to do hardware, and we will stick to software, least for now.

Of course, if we find ourselves a couple years from now with the resources and facilities to do it, we would look at this again. But, probably only if we have the resources to have something custom built for us, and are able to move enough of them to make such a thing a viable proposition.

You can always put together something of this sort yourself. It's all basically off the shelf stuff.

 

[betrickey]

What "off the shelf stuff" would be required. How easy would it be to configure would these items.? Is there a web site where I can get more info relating to this topic?

 

[Dean Roddey]

It's really just a PC, usually running an mini-ITX MB, which can run XP or Embedded XP. The only thing that's remotely off the beaten path is the solid state drive. You can Google for 'solid state drive' and find all kinds of stuff. It's basically like a standard drive except no moving parts, and that you don't want to be constantly writing to it because it does have a limited number of times it can be written. They good ones are smart and move data around to even out the write access.

It's this latter which is really the only place in which CQC is not really optimal for such a system. It is written with a regular hard drive in mind and doesn't really try to minimize access to the hard drive. The only place where this is really a big concern is in the log server, to which all CQC programs log information centrally so that you can diagnose system wide issues or host specific issues without having to go that machine physically.

What we really need to do is have an option on the log server that will log to memory and not try to keep a persistent log. That would remove the far and away biggest concern about wearing out the drive, and even then it's mostly only when problems occur and somebody starts logging information.