Diskless Network

There are 4 pc are in Network, from whcih one is server and remaining
are clients. server is having a hard disk, whereas clients haven't.

Aim is to establish Network any sense. I.e. having NICs in all and
connected with cables.

How can I boot clients from server? (Network Booting) Can I use Floopy
for that, if yes then that floopy contains what?

Explain me in detail.....

If any books or links suggested by you, highly oblige to all of you...

thanks

"nirlep" <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote in message
news:(E-Mail Removed) m...
> There are 4 pc are in Network, from whcih one is server and remaining
> are clients. server is having a hard disk, whereas clients haven't.
>
> Aim is to establish Network any sense. I.e. having NICs in all and
> connected with cables.
>
> How can I boot clients from server? (Network Booting) Can I use Floopy
> for that, if yes then that floopy contains what?
>
> Explain me in detail.....
>
> If any books or links suggested by you, highly oblige to all of you...

All you need is:

http://www.ltsp.org/

Regards

Keller

Hi Nirlep,

"nirlep" <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote:
> There are 4 pc are in Network, from whcih one is server and remaining
> are clients. server is having a hard disk, whereas clients haven't.

You can boot a full featured Linux completely diskless. The theory is quite
simple, but the practical details are a bit tricky.

The clinets need network cards with PXE boot (P)ROMS or the PXE extension in
their bios. When they boot, they'll ask the DHCP server for an IP address
and beside this address, they get a pointer to the TFTP server. Then they
download the boot loader from the TFTP server into RAM and start the boot
sequence, which will mount the rest of the required files via NFS from an
NFS server.

As you can see, your server machine needs a DHCP, TFTP and NFS server and
needs to provide some files in the right places.

Christian

In comp.os.linux.networking nirlep <(E-Mail Removed)>:
> There are 4 pc are in Network, from whcih one is server and remaining
> are clients. server is having a hard disk, whereas clients haven't.

> Aim is to establish Network any sense. I.e. having NICs in all and
> connected with cables.

> How can I boot clients from server? (Network Booting) Can I use Floopy
> for that, if yes then that floppy contains what?

Yep, you can use a floppy, preferable you want a PXE capable NIC.
But it works fine with a floppy, if there's an image for your nic
available:

www.rom-o-matic.net

> Explain me in detail.....

> If any books or links suggested by you, highly oblige to all of you...

www.ltsp.org should be the first, it does anything you want in a
complete package.

Good luck

--
Michael Heiming (X-PGP-Sig > GPG-Key ID: EDD27B94)
mail: echo (E-Mail Removed) | perl -pe 'y/a-z/n-za-m/'
#bofh excuse 373: Suspicious pointer corrupted virtual machine