[K12OSN] OT-Multiple Knoppix and hostnames

["Terrell Prudé Jr."]

Here's an easier idea:

That bit about booting from floppies, I agree.  But what if you could
accomplish the same thing from the hard disk?  That's what I've done
with an old Pentium-133 that had a 1.2GB hard disk from back in the
day.  Just make a standard EtherBoot floppy and "cat" the contents to
the hard disk, like so:

root at knoppix# cat /dev/fd0 /dev/hda

Of course, the floppy drive might be broken, dusty, whatever. 
Alternately, if you just have the EtherBoot file for your NIC somewhere
handy, just do this:

root at knoppix# cat eb-5.0.11-3c905b-tpo.lzdsk /dev/hda

If you've got to burn a CD to do this (this naturally assumes the old
Win98 boxes have CD-ROM drives), then do it.  In this case, the "waste"
of a CD is well worth it.

Note that I used "/dev/hda", not "/dev/hda1" or "/dev/hda2", etc.  This
is because you're cat'ing to the device directly.  You're effectively
turning that hard disk into a really big Etherboot "floppy".  Then, just
boot the client from the hard disk as normal, you'll see EtherBooting
taking place, and the LTSP login screen should come up just fine.

As for VLAN'ing the clients, I've done that before, for the same reasons
that you mentioned; re-wiring just wasn't feasible.  VLANs are great for
this.  Just remember to put the server's internal interface on that same
VLAN!  :-)

--TP
_______________________________
Do you GNU!?
Microsoft Free since 2003 <http://www.gnu.org/>--the ultimate antivirus
protection!


ssh at tranquility.net wrote:
> Hi All,
>
> My workplace has a dozen Win98 machines they need to replace. I have
> been trying to promote K12LTSP to them. The client needs are very
> minimial. One problem they would have is getting the clients isolated on
> their own network. It may be possible to Vlan them off for that. The
> clients are so physically scattered that re-wiring is not a trivial
> task. Floppy boot is also problematic because it is a dusty environment.
>
> Barring that, I considered booting the clients to Knoppix. I can
> remaster Knoppix and remove much (most) of what is unneeded. A problem I
> wonder about is having a lot of computers on the network all with
> "Knoppix" as the hostname. 
>
> There's a couple of ways around this. Since the machines have storage,
> it wouldn't be too hard to save a persistent home directory to a FAT32
> partition, and have them booted with the cheatcodes to read the info
> from there. K12LTSP does this by having everything named in /etc/hosts
> file. What would be a good way? 
>
> thx
> Scott S.
>   
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> _______________________________________________
> K12OSN mailing list
> K12OSN at redhat.com
> https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/k12osn
> For more info see <http://www.k12os.org>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listman.redhat.com/archives/k12osn/attachments/20070302/bc3dca1a/attachment.htm>