[K12OSN] thin clients

[aust_txv at ACCESS-K12.org]

> have some old Dell OptiPlex GX110s.  I took out the
> harddrives, CDs, and floppy drives.  It looks like I
> should leave the floppy drive long enough to load some
> information into the memory of the NIC.  I'm not quite
> sure what to do here.  If anyone could give me some
> help here I would appreciate it.

Hi Tom. Sorry if this is old news for you. If those Dell's have on-board 
ethernet ports and you took out the harddrives - - just plug them in to 
your network :) Do they try to boot from the network ?  I have a bunch of 
Dells and they work great as thins.  Better as thins than as regular 
windows machines.

"YES the workstation tries to boot from the network but the LTSP server is 
not answering."

Check your two ethernet ports on the server make sure they are not 
backwards.  Switch the cables.

"NO these machines don't have on-board ethernet."

Go to rom-o-matic.net.  Enable your workstation to boot from the floppy 
first.
Make a DOS boot disk with the file made at rom-o-matic.  Boot to the floppy 
and via autoexec.bat launch that file you made at rom-o-matic.  The image 
you create muct be for the ethernet card in the machine.  Using this method 
you can boot nearly ANY PC as a thin provide you have medium video and a 
NIC which has a rom-o-matic image.  You can use any media you like, old 
harddrives, CDROM, floppy, boot-rom.
Hope this helps,
Tom V.