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Diskless Systems

C

Cenalian

Senior member
Not sure if this or Distributed Computing is the best place for a question like this, but I figured I'd start here.

I have a few 486s lying around that I'm not doing anything with. What I was planning on doing was (since not all have hard drives) turning an extra box I had into a server, which I could run diskless systems off of.

I was wondering if anyone knew a little more about this and could help me get started (not a clue here). First thing is that I'd need some sort of OS to do this with... I was thinking a disto of Linux if possible (Beowolf???)... I know HP_UX and Sun Solaris will do it fine, but I want something that I can still use as a 2nd desktop...

any suggestions???
 
Depends on what you'd like to do with your diskless nodes. If you're interested in joining the distributed computing effort, Kilowatt wrote a Linux boot disk that will set your system up to crack for distributed.net projects.

If you want to use a 486 as a network router instead of springing for a Netgear/Linksys/SMC, you can use Freesco to route your traffic and act as a print server. It'll also do dial-on-demand and fits on a single floppy.

Both of the above software runs using Linux. You might also set one of those machines up as a fileserver since that doesn't need much horsepower. To get the rest of the diskless computers to boot from a server will probably require that you have boot PROMs in your NICs (probably costs more than its worth), but I'm not sure how that's set up.

Atx
 
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