Wolfgang, this sounds cool!  I'm very familiar with diskless RH/Mandake Linux network 
booting having worked with the Linux Terminal Server Project (http://www.ltsp.org) for 
a  few months now.  However, I have never tried the Debian distro.

I would be very interested in seeing your cron scripts so that I can try this method 
using Red Hat 9.0.

Thanx
TJ




--

--------- Original Message ---------

DATE: 16 Jun 2003 14:18:00 +020
From: Wolfgang Borst <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Cc: 

>hello everyone ..
>
>i use a diskless debian linux to do the unattended installations here.
>setting up such a system is not complicated but you will need a few
>daemons to be installed on your server(s).
>
>how it works
>------------
>linux is booted via etherboot [http://www.etherboot.org/] and runs
>completely off the network. after system bootup a cron job is started
>every minute to get the current machine ready to install windows xp. i
>use a cron job because the script checks if it is allowed to install
>etc.
>if the script is permitted to install, it will do the following things:
>
>- partition the hardisk [parted
>http://packages.debian.org/unstable/admin/parted.html]
>- creating fat32 fileystems [parted]
>- make the machine bootable (using w98/command.com)[ms-sys
>http://packages.debian.org/unstable/admin/ms-sys.html]
>- copy the files
>- customize unattend.txt
>
>after that the machine is rebootet, starts the w98/command.com and
>starts the windows xp setup.
>
>tech
>----
>on a server the following daemons are needed:
>
>- dhcpd for the ip addresses
>- tftpd for booting via network (fetching the kernel)
>- nfsd provides the client with nfs-root-fs etc.
>- mysqld stores informations about the clients (mac-address, is the
>machine to be installed ..), about the software(which installscript is
>used for software xyz, which software is part of the group 'base
>installation' ).
>
>the kernel for the clients is fetched via tftp then the root-fileystem
>is mounted via nfs. instead of being limited to a 1.44m floppy this
>diskless linux is a full blown linux with all the nice tools (like a
>sshd server running on it). currently the installation is 190M + 2M per
>diskless client (so for a whole subnet one would need ~700M).
>
>maybe i'm allowed to release this project in the near future.
>
>wolfgang
>-- 
>Wolfgang Borst <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> GPG/PGP key 4107B17B
>



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