[TriLUG] diskless x86

[Jon Carnes]

On Friday 26 July 2002 08:04 pm, Chris Merrill wrote:
> Mike Mueller wrote:
> > Is it possible to have an x86 mobo, enet card and power supply become a
> > diskless node?  If so, can I get an outline of what I need to know to
> > get that to work?  I think I've heard of Linux routers in a similar
> > configuration using the floppy disk.  I'd like to skip the floppy and
> > run out of a RAM disk.
>
> Is there PC hardware that can boot from LAN?
> I'm quite curious as to how one could get
> Linux into RAM without some flavor of storage
> device (floppy, CD, HD)?

Yes.

Any PC (or any machine for that matter) can be set to boot via the network. 
You need a special Network card - or you need to purchase a Bios chip for 
your current network card.  

In days gone by, all network cards came with an empty slot for sticking a 
Bios chip on it - the chip was far less expensive than Hard drives.  You 
put the chip on the card, set the card to advertise itself as a boot device 
to your computer, then run off to a local server and setup Bootp or tftp on 
it, along with some generated boot images that will work for the computer 
with the network card.

Once you do it a few times, it gets real easy.  I had a lot of clients that 
used this as their prefered workstation setup.  The damn things ran forever 
and were very easy to troubleshoot - plus they boot incredably fast 
(compared to HD boot at the time).

You can generate any image for these workstations: Windows, DOS, Linux, 
CPM, etc...  The only constaint on the image is how much RAM is in each 
workstation.  Once you generate an image for a workstation, you simply 
store it on your server. Then you control which images go out to which 
workstations based on their MAC address. 

Jon