Caltrops - American McGee's Honda Civic - Re: PXE for fucking idiots

Forum Overview :: American McGee's Honda Civic

by jeep 01/14/2005, 7:22pm PST

Chairman Mao wrote:

No, seriously, I have come across a bunch of shit about PXE that acts like this is common knowledge like using fucking Word. Anything out there that is a non-ivory tower IT fagfest?

I don't know where you came across it, but it's mostly for terminal use, though lately I've been testing it as a replacement for overnight ghosting ( we finally have enough users that I feel like we should stop doing manual rebuilds ).

Anyway you either need a machine that has PXE on the motherboard, on the ethernet adapter, or boots from a CD...booting it from a HD would sort of defeat the purpose, but I guess you could. TFTP is the tiny ftp protocol necessary for the second startup step: the machine powers up, it sends a signal for pxe and accepts a dhcp assignment. The PXE server (which usually also is the dhcp server) is running tftpd and hands a kernel to the client which is what it boots with.

For terminals the benefit for my office has been pretty impressive, the low level office admin staff, clerks, and data entry staff are all basically running off the same machine, listening to music, checking email, web, editing simple excel and word files. Pretty low-level stuff. The data entry personnel use Oracle Clinical which has some pain in the ass jinit-11819 client, but I got that to run, too.

There was a couple of introductory methods (ie. free) so you don't feel like you pissed cash away just to test something out. One is LTSP, and the other is Stateless. The first works with linux and I figure probably BSD, though I haven't tested it, the second is strictly for Fedora Linux, which is pretty easy to install anyway.

Even if you don't want to actually try to set it up, you can just read through the Stateless one to get an idea of how people use PXE for terminals, the howto is pretty much step-by-step, where the LTSP one takes a lot of reading.

/jeep/