[K12OSN] Booting older thin clients

[Michael Blinn]

  Yeah, my adult users would lose the CDs (;

  Does the NIC with bootrom route require a semi-new BIOS that can 
recognize a NIC as a boot device? If not, from a purely intellectual 
standpoint, how does the computer know to boot from it?

Thanks Petre,
  Michael

Petre Scheie wrote:
> You can boot a thin client from a CD, just like you can boot one from 
> a floppy disk.  And you can still use the CD drive and the floppy 
> drive for Local Device Access (LDA).  But there are some tradeoffs.  
> First, to use the CD or floppy drive, users will have to remove the 
> boot CD/floppy, which means they're going to lose the CD/floppy or 
> scratch/break it or forget to put it back in, etc.  If your users are 
> all adults, this might, MIGHT be manageable; but if your users are 
> kids, I think you'll find it frustrating.  BTW, LDA does not support 
> music CDs in the clients.
>
> You can buy a NIC with a bootrom for $20 at disklessworkstations.com. 
> These are great, and you never have to worry about losing the boot 
> media.  Of course, using an etherboot CD or floppy is cheaper, so it 
> really depends on what your priority is.