Knoppix booting up via ethernet

[UY]

I tot I read about this some where on this forum last year, and now using search on this forum I can find nothing about this.

There were some discussion about booting Knoppix up via LAN on very simple single board PCs that has no harddisk no CDROM no floppy etc. Just a CPU + RAM + UMA AGP video & ethernet NIC + USB.

I remembered some one told the forum that Knoppix will be able to boot up via DHCP+BOOTP / PXE where the image of Knoppix ISO is on a LAN server which let multiple number of diskless PC bootup to Knoppix.

Could any better knowledged Knoppix user pse share some light on this aspect pse!

[UnderScore]

First, please stop posting your questions in Ideas since it is not the place for such questions and also your question will get limited exposure here as not too many people will be reading this.
Next, I just searched the forums with PXE and found many relevant hits. The best that I can give is to suggest that you start reading through the forums & bookmark the important posts.

[mzilikazi]

I tot I read about this some where on this forum last year, and now using search on this forum I can find nothing about this.

Try the Docs link at the top of the page.

[garyng]

KNOPPIX on single board PC ? Seems to be wrong choice for me. Those things usually have fixed hardware spec with limited resources. You usually want to maximize them by specially catered kernel + rootfs for specific usage(usually use uClibc + busybox instead of glibc). KNOPPIX is just not designed for that purpose.

Now, if you want to do pxe boot for pretty old PC then using NFS root, KNOPPIX may be the right choice.

The strength of KNOPPIX is mainly is hardware detection(though other distro is catching up fast, including the next debian stable aka sarge) which you don't need for special purpose PC and its live CD feature which you also don't need as single board PC usually don't have it.

[UY]

KNOPPIX on single board PC ? Seems to be wrong choice for me. Those things usually have fixed hardware spec with limited resources. You usually want to maximize them by specially catered kernel + rootfs for specific usage(usually use uClibc + busybox instead of glibc). KNOPPIX is just not designed for that purpose.

Now, if you want to do pxe boot for pretty old PC then using NFS root, KNOPPIX may be the right choice.

The strength of KNOPPIX is mainly is hardware detection(though other distro is catching up fast, including the next debian stable aka sarge) which you don't need for special purpose PC and its live CD feature which you also don't need as single board PC usually don't have it.

I used the search, and finally found back to this thread because the manager moved it to this folder. Sorry for placing it in the wrong folder the first time. Had no idea where is this subject suppose to go.

Not sure if what I called a Singleboard PC is misunderstood here.

I am not refering to the industrial PC of 3.5" or 5.25" form factors, I refer to consumer mini-ATX and NSX. e.g. this one:

http://www.matsonic.com/new/productsdata/ms8188e.htm

I called this a single board because we use them as it is, in single board only, and no add-on cards on them necessary. The board got LAN, sound, AGP Video, USB, etc. Some times they had AMD Duron soldered to the board without socket and shipped tested. I only add DDR RAM & it boots up on thumbdrive USB, CDROM, LAN, IDE etc.

All versions of Knoppix from 3.3 to 3.6 had been tested to boot up correctly via CDROM on these boards. The next goal is to have them boot up on LAN, via BOOTP+DHCP or PXE. This way we can get very simple LAN nodes with no HDD/CDROM/Floppy, the image compressed in Knoppix has everything we needed. And it plug & play is very strong.

If successful in LAN booting Knoppix, we can have diskless LAN completely without MS Windows. Then we can generally forget about virus! The diskless LAN nodes are very generic and any user can use any node to access to their own things.

Currently SPYware & virus pleage many number of MS PCs, causing a hard job to keep them maintained.

I have no doubt that Knoppix will boot up on these boards, because I use it all the time with these boards. Problem is where to get info on LAN booting. I remember I saw this subject on this forum last year.

Any one here did such thing as booting Knopix over ethernet? Pse share some info!

Thanks!

[UY]

Try the Docs link at the top of the page.

Hi:

Thanks and I read there at :

http://www.knoppix.net/docs/index.php/FaqPXE

But there is nothing regarding the Knoppix image server side, or how to set up Knoppix ISO9660 image to be shared out. I think there is some tricks involved in the boot sector or boot loader, which is what I need to read. There should be also IP address & DHCP issues.

I was hoping to be able to find some old discussion thread about this, but search came out with nothing. So I started this thread.

Surely I won't be the only one here interested in such application!

[UY]

I found it inside Knoppix 3.6 that there is a Knoppix->services->start knoppix terminal server, and it does exactly what I wanted.

Just post it here, so that the other user doing search in the future will find it.



I had been able to boot up other PCs via ethernet boot after I set up that termininal server.

As I checked other threads I found that many users were able to use this into quite advanced level, but there is no discussion for new comers on how to start.

For now, I am interested to know a few steps further:

* Can a seperated DHCP server be used, such as one alredy existing in the LAN and already well managed.

* How can DNS be seperatedly hosted, such as there are zones already created and in use on other Linux servers.

* How about users / groups? Must be NIS? Must be LDAP? Can we use a SAMBA emulated windows domain? (easy migration from existing windows domain)

I invite people with similar interest to discuss here.


Thanks & regards

UY