[K12OSN] using really old PCs as clients

[Joseph Bishay]

Hello,


On Wed, Oct 14, 2009 at 2:50 PM, j.w. thomas <jthomas at bittware.com> wrote:
> Terrell Prudé Jr. wrote:
>>
>>  terrell at thinclientmaker$ su - root
>>  Password:  (enter root's password here)
>>  root at thinclientmaker# cat eb-5.4.4-3c90x.zdsk > /dev/hdb
>>  root at thinclientmaker# halt
>>
>> Then, just pop this new "EtherBoot hard disk" back into the old box and
>> boot from it.  If you set up one box to do all your old hard disks this way,
>> it goes pretty quickly.  I did something similar with some EIDE Sun Ultra 5
>> hard disks a few years back (I used an x86 machine for the cat'ing), and I
>> had ten hard disks all config'd in about 20 minutes.
>>
> It would be really sweet to have a LiveCD that did this for you.  With
> appropriate warnings!

I know I found a while ago a floppy image that does just that -- you
boot off the floppy and it then runs a script that will automatically
partition a 10 MB section on the hard drive of the machine and install
on it a universal network bootup script.  Take out the floppy, reboot,
and you're done -- it will from then on boot off the network (unless
you change the options that were there to let it dual boot, etc.) It
is a pretty awesome floppy that I constantly use, but I can't seem to
find the place online I downloaded it from originally!  Maybe someone
else has heard of it...

Joseph