Diskless workstations
Daniel J Walsh
dwalsh at redhat.com
Fri Jul 25 10:17:25 UTC 2003
Chuck Wolber wrote:
>
>
>>I have been working on a package called redhat-config-netboot that
>>allows you to setup diskless environments using NFS, as well as network
>>installations. It is based somewhat off of LTSB. It is basically a
>>series of scripts and python code that sets up a PXE boot environment
>>and an diskless NFS partition.
>>
>>ftp://people.redhat.com/dwalsh/netboot
>>
>>Comments welcome.
>>
>>
>
>Pretty intuitive and straightforward approach. If I read your README
>correctly, it looks as if you install an OS on a machine that will be a
>similar configuration to the diskless machines and then upload that image
>at boot time to the diskless clients.
>
>My only comment so far is, why are you locking things down by MAC address?
>Wouldn't end user authentication be a more appropriate method (RFID is
>what comes to mind, but PAM is a good abstraction model)? It seems like
>you're really marrying the hardware to the software in several ways. Why
>can't I boot from a floppy and load my workstation image onto my laptop
>(which happens to have 1GB of RAM) if I'm in a meeting "down the hall"
>without having to update a dhcpd.conf file.
>
>-Chuck
>
>
>
>
I am locking the system to an IP Address, nothing more. The reason for
this is so that the machine boots the same
every time, unless the sysadmin changes the boot configuration file (PXE
File). This way there is consistancy between boots, like there would be
in a diskfull system. The client uses the IP Address to find the system
specific data on the server. I can't use the authentication because
there is no gaurantee that anyone is even going to be logging into the
machine (think blade servers). Also a lot of the system specific
information is required long before the login prompt happens.
One interesting point that people keep bringing up is the idea of having
the entire operating system in RAM instead of using NFS. In this
situation you would get a completely fresh machine on every reboot, ie
there would be nothing retained between boots. Might be an interesting
experiment to try.
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