[K12OSN] OT, slightly: loading OS remotely, running locally
Todd O'Bryan
toddobryan at mac.com
Fri May 12 10:02:56 UTC 2006
I have a lab of 30 relatively recent P4's with 512MB of RAM, decent
hard drives, etc.
In terms of running fast, they're great. In terms of maintenance,
they're a nightmare. Having to re-install software on all of them or
re-image the lab when I discover a permissions problem I've mis-set
(and on Windows, that's way too common) is a huge pain.
So, I was thinking, what if I had a central server that wasn't
responsible for *running* all the programs on the local machines, but
did serve the OS to them through PXE and hosted a common filesystem
(including /home and /usr). Updates would occur once, students would
be able to access their files from anywhere in the lab, and I could
still boot Windows from the hard drive if I needed to.
(I've also thought about setting up an image and having it auto-
update itself using rsync or something from a central repository as a
way of automating system updates, but that seems slightly dicier.)
Anyway, has anyone done anything (or heard of anyone doing anything)
similar?
Thanks,
Todd
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