I work at a toystore with horribly outdated hardware (faded RS-232 terminals with hacked terminfo entries to make all text bold) and we're finally considering an upgrade.

We're looking into X Windows terminals, to help identify the many tagless products that abound in the store. The tty terminals currently under consideration are around $300, which could just as easily cover a X terminal.

I've heard that there are dedicated hardware X servers (aka no OS/Hard Drive/etc), but have been unable to find any information about them. Does anyone here have any links? I tried googling, but can't figure out what keyword combination to use to get any results. The alternative is using stripped down PCs for the X servers... a couple terminals are close enough to share a single computer, but that's about it. An advantage there, however, would be the ability to install WiFi cards instead of re-cabling the store (the screen would suffer on the cat-3 cabling we have).

All links much appreciated... to anyone replying: if you have any links handy about securing WiFi, that would be great (I'm hoping to not need to change our encryption key every few weeks... we'd have a minimum of 3 different WiFi clients to change every time.)

I think this is what you're looking for:

http://www.ltsp.org

That gives the information on how to set up a collection of diskless workstations. And you can buy the diskless clients at

http://www.disklessworkstations.com

There should be an image of the box on the top-right portion of the page.

The LTSP site makes suggestions on what hardware to have in the terminal server itself, but a fully loaded one shouldn't run you anymore than a high-end desktop PC (because that's all it is... )

EDIT:
I'm not sure about the wifi.. sorry, I got gung-ho about posting the link that I didn't digest the whole post completely. If you want to use wifi, then you may have to custom build you clients instead of purchasing them from the link above... I don't believe they have wifi built into those clients.

Securing Wi-Fi is very difficult to do right now, as such, I wouldn't recommend it for anything mission critical or sensitive. The diskless workstations are not too difficult to do however, and would be very viable.

Dark_Helmet: Thanks for the links... this is the general kind of thing I'm looking for, anyways :-). I'm bookmarking it for consideration all the same... I believe it'd be possible to make the same kind of thing for a lot cheaper than the $350+ they're asking for.

Mad Merlin: Wouldn't it be possible to use something like SSL? any links for layering SSL atop X Windows?

As for the security: The intent behind the security would be to prevent a hacker from pretending to be a cash register and mucking around with our inventory and such... and also preventing password snooping. I vaugley remember hearing rumors about 256-bit WEP keys in the somewhat near future?

Also, wouldn't it be possible to create a daemon that accepts (encrypted) broadcast messages to update their WEP key? I havn't touched WiFi on linux, how are WEP keys handled? (Is there even a standard or do all the different hardware makers have their own config file setup?!?)

Anyways, any and all info appreciated!

Well, the whole problem with Wi-Fi is that the inherent security on it is extremely weak, and pretty well anyone can break into a Wi-Fi LAN with even a modest amount of traffic. It is very important that you use some sort of software encryption, and be sure to strictly limit how connections are made to your LAN.

I agree that Wi-Fi can be handy for laptops and the like, but unless you really like the idea of wireless, then I'd recommend good old RJ-45's for the time being.

With your time, maybe not.
I've always thought a nice ITX mainboard, good RAM, and a floppy or Zip would do the trick. This is very uninformed advice though.

We're close enough to christmas that an upgrade right now is out of the question... any upgrade will be somewhere in January, most likely... so we're not under high pressure yet :-). I'm going to head over to a nearby PC parts shop and see what kind of bargins are available at the moment. I'll look into netbooting... and also setting up SSL. Again, any/all links would be appreciated.

128-bit, 256-bit, or even 512-bit encryption can be cracked although it will take time for a hacker to figure out the encryption. Also encryption for wireless networking slows down the network making it worthless when you have a lot of tranactions at peak times. Its best if you can go with ethernet or find any unused wiring like telephone wire.

I don't know how small of computer that you want but you can buy some embedded boards that are x86 based or a different platform. Like some people said run them as a diskless machines.

http://www.icpamerica.com

anything can be cracked given enough time. I believe the figure on deducing 128 bit WEP keys is somewhere around 8 million packets = ~a week of snooping a constantly active network? I also believe the increase is exponential in relationship to the # of bits used? this would put the time to crack a 256-bit encryption well outside the lifetime of the hardware it would be used on...

please correct me if I'm wrong about this.

That's a good link... I'm trying to sort out what exactly does what, but I'm investigating.