[K12OSN] Thin clients booting from a different server

[Les Mikesell]

On Sun, 2006-08-06 at 12:56, Alan Hodson wrote:
> a) Yes, the booting thin clients need to boot from the remote lab,
> although a shared storage area in the remote server might just do the
> trick. I'll have to ask the teacher.

It is relatively straightforward to run a program on a
remote machine or to mount shared directories.  In the
thin client case this only needs to happen on the servers
which might make the routing easier for you.

> b) The thin clients are diskless - no CD/floppy drives... purchasing
> them I suppose may be another consideration.

It might be possible to USB-boot the thinstation client.

> c) <<<it just involves configuring the DHCP server to give the clients
> it's address as the next-server and in the root-path option>>> 
> Configuring the DHCP of the main VLAN (main server) involves a change in
> what files?

If it is linux it would be the /etc/dhcpd.conf file and you
have to restart the dhcpd service after changes.  If the
VLAN structure puts the clients on the 'inside' nic of the
wrong server you may run into some quirks with NAT or
firewalling on it's outside NIC - or firewalling on the
other server.  If the first server does normal routing instead
of NAT and neither has firewalling enabled it should work
fine.  I'm not sure how the root NFS mount will work through
NAT - I think it should, but haven't ever tried it.

-- 
  Les Mikesell
   lesmikesell at gmail.com