Semi-diskless clients

[Ben Sagal <bmsagal@gmail.com>]

I have a network setup with a few debian diskless clients.  It also
has few windows clients, which constantly get messed up. These
computes do not have much memory so require a swap partition.

I would like to have them boot disklessly (in order that that I can
manage them centrally, and this also provides a simple way to reset
them) but still use the disk for swap.  Is there a way i can set up
the system in that if there is a hard disk it loads up the ide
modules, and if it finds a swap partition activates it (when the
partition could have different numbers on different machines)?

Ben