On Mon, 2004-07-12 at 10:48, Salman Haq wrote: > Hi All, > > I am trying to build a network of Debian PCs which must be diskless. > The idea is that every once in a while the clients can be booted (may > be remotely?) to download an upgraded kernel. Previously, we have used > removable hard drives - very time consuming. > > From browsing around, I've come to learn that there are a number of > ways that this can be achieved, eg: TCP/IP PXE (hard pxe for intel > nics), Etherboot (soft pxe), etc. > > I would like to hear from people who have attempted this before and > have some useful tips to offer. May be some one could weigh-in with > advantages/disadvantages of using one option over another. > > I anticipate that our client PCs will be based on Intel motherboards. Well, I've never gone so far as to set up diskless clients, but I have set up network booting for the purpose of doing network-based installs without a CD-ROM. I used PXE and followed the instructions on the debian-installer wiki. Important things to note are to use a TFTP server that supports PXE (tftpd does not. tftpd-hpa and atftpd both do however.) Make sure your DHCP server is properly set up to give out TFTP info, and you should be good to go. One important thing to note is that one of the PC's that I used for testing did not work for quite a while. It was an old Compaq using an Intel network card. No matter what I did, it would either come back with a timeout error or the TFTP server would report a client error. Upgrading the BIOS (the network card was built into the motherboard) took care of the problem and it's been working fine since. I'd imagine that all newer boards should have no problems. -- Alex Malinovich Support Free Software, delete your Windows partition TODAY! Encrypted mail preferred. You can get my public key from any of the pgp.net keyservers. Key ID: A6D24837
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