I have this exact type of setup with my remaster, I have built a custom IDS solution with distributed sensors, central server (with redundants) and remote consoles. On boot up I added a cheatcode 'hostname' that determines the type of role that the machine will perform. This type of functionality, I believe, is what some of you are after.

If so you can easily achieve this with only a few extra lines of code to the linuxrc file in miniroot.gz

If anyone is interested I'll post some possible modifications to achieve this functionality. Fortunately this type of modification should not require a complete remaster and could be tackled by the novice Knoppix tinkerer.

The proposed modification would be:
1. Instead of standard 'Knoppix' hostname, it would be be something like 'knoppix-MACADDRESS'
2. If cheatcode is supplied override hostname (eg. boot: knoppix 'hostname=knoppix-1')