network boot?

**Verdant** · 11-07-2003, 03:59 PM

i'd like to setup a few network only systems (no local hdd)

can anyone help me figure out how i would do this? someone tole me knoppix is good for this, but i have no idea how to setup the "server" or the network only clients.

i am sure there is a guide somewhere, someone want to point me in the right direction?

**rneff** · 11-07-2003, 04:57 PM

You are going to need to be a lot more specific for your question. Since you dont want to have/use a hard drive, knoppix is like the right solution for you.

**Verdant** · 11-07-2003, 05:57 PM

not sure how to be more specific

i want to buy a few systems that will boot linux from a network location, using an onboard NIC, i want to have a server that will provide the linux "image" or whatever is needed to boot it. Server configuration would be whatever is best/easiest for this setup

they would all be connected to a hub or a switch

these computers will have no harddrive, also i would prefer having them not run any gui stuff.

these computer's sole purpose will be distc and distributed computing projects

**j.drake** · 11-07-2003, 06:07 PM

I don't know anything about this myself, but I did find some things for A. Jorge Garcia that look to be directly on point for what you want to do.

http://www.knoppix.net/forum/viewtop...ghlight=#26459

Scroll up a few posts, and you'll see where Jorge gives a link to a several-page magazine article.

Now, as it turns out, Jorge never got it to work this way, and used another approach. To see what he did (which isn't what you said you wanted to do), try searching the recent posts of A. Jorge Garcia.

**locutus** · 11-10-2003, 07:43 AM

Knoppix comes with LTSP as part of the CD and that should do the trick. You'll find it under the KNOPPPIX->Services menu structure as "Start KNOPPIX Terminal Server".

if you don't want a GUI on your workstations then when it prompts for parameters to boot, remove the default "wheelmouse" setting and add "2". That'll boot the workstations to runlevel 2 so you'll get networking but now GUI's. If you want to customize the system, then you'll need to mess with NFS exporting a partition from the server to your workstations and seeing if you can get them to run somekind of startup scripts like knoppix.sh and add "myconfig=scan" to the startup option.

Hopefully this is helpful.

**arkaine23** · 11-11-2003, 10:38 PM

Here's the trick:

To run a dist computing app like say folding@home on multiple pxe booted clients- you'd need a different image for each to boot from. They would all want to fold onto an NFS export on the server, but would so so to the same directory which would not be good. What'd you need is for the folding script to fold to a different directoy on the server for each client.

ie:

/data/fold1
/data/fold2
/data/fold3
etc

Where /data is exported via NFS.

Each client's fold script has to know that it has its own specific fold directory on the server. So I'd think that each client would have to have its own image to be booted. This means the server has to boot each client with a different image (though it wouldn't have to dedicate an image to a specific client).

Maybe instead of multiple images, it could just be written into the script to ask the server how many clients are currently active and fold into the appropriate directory based on that...

See what I'm saying? I badly want to do this. To create a dozen or more images each with just a slight variation in the scripts for folding@home. That way I can make a pre-packaged knoppix server CD, and provide client images for download so that user's can quickly hd-install a server and add the client images and have the whole package preconfigured so that setup will take less than an hour, most of it just waiting for the hd-install and for images to be untarred.

I think this is also what the original poster is hoping to do. And the idea is to make it modular- folding, seti, whatever DC app you wanted could have scripts. distcc for that matter too. Let this act as a cluster for compiling....