
Diskless booting will make your life easier - oremanj
http://blog.ksplice.com/2010/05/scalable-day-to-day-diskless-booting/
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sophacles
Hadoop clusters are particularly amenable to this. A nice setup is to pxe boot
all the nodes, reserving the full local disk for hdfs.

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nailer
Faster and more automated than PXE: access the firmware directly over the
network via SMASH / SSH and send commands to load an image which starts the
OS.

No manually accessing firmware to kick of PXE, so you can build a few hundred
physical boxes in a second without too much effort.

SMASH is vendor neutral, so it works across HP, Dell, IBM, and other vendors.

If you're a decent frontend django programmer, and think we could make a
business of this, get in touch. My contact details are in my profile.

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jeremyw
Interesting. I've built a few PXE-/IPMI-based control and boot systems, but
haven't run across the SMASH acronym before. Looks like it was a set of
recommendations after IPMI 1.0 that eventually were incorporated into IPMI
2.0, important bits like secure shell (SSH) access to the console, virtual
boot media and better power management.

I'd stick with the IPMI moniker, it's what people will know. :)

(Btw, your profile appears blank -- hn anomaly?)

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qjz
What about wireless clients? Is it even possible to diskless boot (PXE or
otherwise) a wireless laptop? This is one significant change in networking
that the article overlooks when discussing the fall in popularity of diskless
booting.

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oremanj
Recent versions of gPXE have support for booting over wireless, but the
wireless connection model (where you might be moving around and have a weak
connection sometimes) isn't very amenable to having your root filesystem
mounted over wireless. You also have to do more setup, partially because the
wired discriminant of "use the network attached to the cable that's plugged
in" fails.

So, it's definitely possible, but it might not yet be worth the effort.

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bshep
Can network boot be done for Windows and OSX? I've looked around and never
found a good tutorial or anything to point me in the right direction ( well at
least for Windows, I havent really looked for OSX yet ). I did get it working
for linux though and it was really useful since I only needed to push updates
once.

If anyone has any links or pointers I would be very interested.

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Nwallins
OS X for sure has network booting. I believe it is referred to as 'netboot'.
<http://www.google.com/search?q=os+x+netboot>

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bshep
How about windows? I would LOVE to have my home/work windows PCs netboot

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jodrellblank
I don't think you can share out a folder and get Windows to boot using it as
the system drive, but I think you can get Windows to boot without a local hard
drive and instead using an iSCSI LUN as the hard disk.

<http://www.google.com/search?q=windows%20boot%20from%20iscsi>

Has various things which look like guides and relevant discussions.

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bshep
Thank you!!! That site looks really useful!

EDIT: Oops this should have gone under 'oremanj' link
(<http://etherboot.org/wiki/start>) I got the gPXE chainloading working
already, took some trial and error.

If anyone else is interested try the 'alldrivers' option rather than the
'undionly' option when making your .kpxe ( [http://rom-o-matic.net/gpxe/gpxe-
git/gpxe.git/contrib/rom-o-...](http://rom-o-matic.net/gpxe/gpxe-
git/gpxe.git/contrib/rom-o-matic/) )

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jodrellblank
I didn't mean it in the "Let me google that for you" sense, but meant "try
looking for iSCSI related things instead of PXE related things - look here are
some results which support the idea that it's possible using that approach,
but I don't know enough about diskless Windows booting to be able to pick a
result which isn't terrible and unhelpful".

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seiji
Informative (and engaging) google talk with the etherboot/gPXE team:
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GofOqhO6VVM>

They talk about historical details of BIOS booting and PXE along with using
open BIOS firmware to speed up booting.

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Anon84
I built an opportunistic cluster a few years ago using PXE boot. You can read
the write up here: <http://www.linux.com/archive/feed/49654>

