[TriLUG] another nifty knoppix trick

[Jason Tower]

recently i needed to image a bunch mini-itx systems with no optical 
drive, and decided that PXE booting was the easiest way to do it w/o 
additional hardware.  i booted $WIFE's pc with the latest knoppix CD 
(3.6) and went to knoppix->services->terminal server.  it asks a couple 
of questions about networking and then configuires various services 
(dhcp, tftp, nfs) to enable seamless PXE booting of a remote client on 
the network.  it's wickedly cool and incredibly easy to set up, the 
only thing i had to do special was select the via-rhine NIC module 
which my mini-itx systems use.  once the remote system was running a 
quick dd over ssh command handled the imaging.

note that unlike the similarly slick LTSP, this is not a thin client 
setup, it is a diskless setup.  with LTSP the apps run on the server 
and display on the thin client (which is really nothing more than a 
standalone networked X server).  very little local cpu power or memory 
is required.  with the knoppix terminal server the "disk" is a nfs 
mount off the terminal server (which of course is just a CD).  the apps 
themselves run locally, which is why it works for imaging (you have 
full access the the local hard drive, just like a local boot of 
knoppix).

once you've seen these types of systems in action, it makes you realize 
how incredibly wasteful and inefficient the standard "fat client" pc 
that most of use use every day really is, both in terms of hardware and 
manpower needed to maintain it.  yes, i know all about citrix and 
windows terminal server, but very few places actually use that 
technology and the licensing costs (especially for citrix) is 
outrageous.  maybe the next few years will start bringing the IT 
industry full circle to fat server/thin client network architectures, 
powered by linux of course :-)

jason

ps - props to john broome who told me about the knoppix terminal server 
option in the first place