Ok, lack of research. Looks like thinstation is what I meant. http://thinstation.sourceforge.net/features.html seems like a nice way to reuse old PCs.
Gene Giannamore Abide International Inc. Technical Support 561 1st Street West Sonoma,Ca.95476 (707) 935-1577 Office (707) 935-9387 Fax (707) 766-4185 Cell [email protected] -----Original Message----- From: Gene Giannamore [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Wednesday, January 21, 2009 12:22 PM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: RE: Free PXE Boot Server I have done similar before with wyse thinclients running winCE. Basically an inexpensive diskless computer that connects to the w2k server running terminal services using the rdp client. When they break, just go get another. Maybe find a bootable floppy or pxe image of whatever minimal OS, with just an RDP client? Gene Giannamore Abide International Inc. Technical Support 561 1st Street West Sonoma,Ca.95476 (707) 935-1577 Office (707) 935-9387 Fax (707) 766-4185 Cell [email protected] -----Original Message----- From: Ben Scott [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Wednesday, January 21, 2009 7:21 AM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: Re: Free PXE Boot Server On Tue, Jan 20, 2009 at 11:57 PM, <[email protected]> wrote: > My Goal is to make it so they boot, and open a webpage via active > desktop or a page in Firefox, as well as have VNC enabled. LTSP can do all that. > On the image side, I want to put in a drive, build the machine in > either Ubuntu or XP. LTSP doesn't work by hard disk imaging. Instead, it boots and runs the remote stations as diskless clients. It basically sends a Linux kernel and network card driver to the client via PXE. Once the kernel is running, it mounts all its filesystems from the LTSP server via NFS (Network File System). By analogy to the Windows world, this would be like having your C:\ drive be a Windows file share, except Windows doesn't have that capability. This method is actually a lot easier and efficient, since you don't have to have entire static hard disk images sitting around. You just have regular files in the server file system. > Any changes will obviously be lost on boot, but that's where the web > page will come in as it can be controlled & changed. You can do this through normal filesystem permissions and user config with LTSP. It's also easy to change and script things, since it's all just in the server filesystem. Try it, you'll like it. ;-) > My idea was something simple like Fog, but it doesn't seem to let you > boot from an image you made to it. It's not a Fog limitation, it's a Windows limitation. Regular MS Windows requires a writable block device ("disk drive") with a writable system partition ("C:\") on it. It doesn't understand the concept of running from a network. Now, there are network block device drivers. They essentially turn a disk image file on a server into something the client sees as a writable disk drive. Windows doesn't know that the block device is actually an image file being transported over the network. This is what AoE (ATA over Ethernet) and iSCSI (SCSI over IP) are all about. They're kind of inefficient, though. Modern hardware often overcomes their inefficiencies, but I dunno how well the older stuff you have will work. There's also the whole WinPE (Windows Preinstallation Environment) thing, but I don't know much about how that works. It might be suitable for the task you describe. Or maybe you can net-boot BartPE or something. But I'm just guessing here. LTSP, I've done myself. -- Ben ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~ ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~ ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~
