On 12/21/2014 11:45 PM, Dan Egli wrote: > On December 18, 2014, Michael Torrie wrote: >> Back to Dan's question. What is your end goal here? What will the >> PXE-booted workstations be used for? > > The idea is to have a central location for all software, all the O/S, > etc.... The workstation should be fast, although perhaps it doesn't quite > need to be SSD fast. The server is booting via it's own SSD, and then has a > Raid 5 of Mechanical HDDs (not Mechanical SSDs, which I've never heard of > either, and I have no idea how I missed that I wrote that :| ). Each > workstation would boot into a full X environment with the NFS root and with > a samba share or a separate NFS share for the RAID itself. Once booted, > each machine would be an independent workstation that happens to be > diskless (except for a couple of machines that have an optical drive, which > most would not have). It would have full access to every day apps like > LibreOffice, Firefox, Thunderbird, etc... and the goal is to keep the > access speed and load times as close as possible to the times they would be > if each machine had booted from it's own SSD.
Well I don't think netbooting will be quite as fast as local SSD. But it might be fast enough. The Linux Terminal Server project has been doing this sort of thing for years. Seems to have worked out fine. They might have more information that would be of value to you. http://www.ltsp.org/ I also came across an article a couple of years ago of a guy who not only did this with Linux, but also netbooted diskless Windows 7 machines. I think he used software iSCSI for the Windows main volumes. /* PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug Don't fear the penguin. */
