IT Question - Multiple boots over a network?

[PotatoMAN]

I work at a school where we have multiple O/S's running for various classes on the same machines. I was just wondering if there is a way I can centralize the boot over the net (or locally and triggered by the net) so that I don't have to physically go to each and every station and swap out a drive. Call me lazy, but I think there is a better solution to just having 4 hard drives per station and swapping them out for different cases. If I am posting in the wrong forum, point me in the right direction! Thanks!

 

[AFB]

Just set up a bootloader with multiple partitions and mirror the drive for each station.

 

[cmetz]

PotatoMAN, what OS(s)?

Linux and *BSD work fine diskless, I'd guess Solaris x86 does too. DOS can run diskless. Windows, on the other hand, gets ugly diskless.

 

[PotatoMAN]

Sorry I haven't been checking the threads for a while - the o/s's being used will be winXP, win2k, win2k3 for the most part, but sometimes we do install linux (it all depends on what is being taught). Thank for your help guys!

About the boot loader and multiple partitions - well, that would get way more complicated than it is worth. We have to re-image the drives every quarter and if there are different o/s configs for a class we would have to re-install each drive with the 2 o/s's accordingly. Then, with the boot loader it would require someone to sit at the computer and type in a selection for the o/s to boot off of, which would require going to each different station. I am trying to avoid touching 200+ computers to setup for classes and just touch 1. That 1 would be a controller of some sort that would let me select the boot for the class computers.

 

[cmetz]

PotatoMAN, how about booting diskless Linux and using some scripts in there to just copy a partition's image back to the hard drive - basically, a cheap way to do a network re-clone. Then use a boot menu. Windows really wants to run from a local hard drive.

If you have the disk space, you can install multiple partitions, one per personality, and use a network boot of Linux or some network boot loaders to have it re-write the partition table and hide/unhide partitions to cause the right thing to boot. So for example you could have two Windows partitions, and depending on the class one would have the right partition ID and would have a placeholder ID. This isn't a secure setup, but as long as you can re-image systems over the network that have been trashed it could be good enough.

 

[PotatoMAN]

cmetz - Would it be possible to do this linux boot loader and o/s hider/unhider with perhaps multiple hard drives and the o/s personalities on each drive? The reason I wish to try and get away from having multiple o/s's on one physical drive is because we use Norton Ghost to backup drive images and I am not quite sure it can identify different partitions and be able to re-image a particular partition rather than the whole drive (correct me if I am wrong). Also, I don't want to have to re-image drives too often over the network because sometimes our drive images can get pretty hefty in size, and when you re-image a class of 30 stations, and have 3-4 classes going on, the last thing you want to do is bog the network down by having gig's and gig's of stuff flying over the network. Sorry I should have re-phrased my question in my original post when taking my network architecture into account. Thanks again for your help!

 

[cmetz]

PotatoMAN, if you have the same or similar drive across systems, you can use Linux to dump a block image of the partition and avoid Ghost altogether. If not, I'm pretty sure Ghost understands partitions. But Ghost is tricky to work with (it can do nearly everything, but often times it's not obvious how to get it to).

Multiple drives is also possible, but your OS will have to be able to deal with being resident on a secondary HD, which many OSs don't like to do. I think you're going to be better off with partitions and tweaking the table to hide/unhide.

For any of this to work, you need to not reimage often. Re-image if a system's busted, plus once a semester. If you have to do this daily, the whole imaging scheme will just fall over.

 

[PotatoMAN]

Thanks cmetz - is there anywhere you can point me to in order to find out more about this stuff? I have messed with linux a little, programmed here and there, but not anywhere enough to fathom a good idea on how to implement something like this. I remember a former employer attempting to use something called grub - but he ditched it like many other ideas we have had here. He said it didn't work, but then again he isn't here anymore and maybe he just got a little lazy in his final days here. I appreciate your help, man!

 

[Delzoun]

You might also look into using either Virtual PC, VMWare or Virtual Server whenever it finally gets released.

We find at my place of work that for classes it's quite a bit easier to manage multiple virtual machines on one box than it is to manage a bunch of different installs. We have used both Virtual PC and VMWare and they both come in pretty clean, I find Virtual PC a bit cleaner personally. This also allows you to run multiple machines at once on one physical machine.

--Delz

 

[cmetz]

PotatoMAN, I assume you're on a university campus? Ask around in the CS and EE departments, find a *IX group - while I strongly encourage you to learn Linux stuff, you'll be much better served finding some local expert on *IX to get you started.

grub is a boot loader that's commonly used for Linux - it can do a boot menu and handle the partition table hiding magic. It's a reasonable way to solve that problem.

Delzoun, VMWare is great. Definitely a tool that may help here. I don't know if the cost will be prohibitive though ($300/seat adds up fast).

You could boot Linux diskless, fire up VMWare under Linux and boot Windows from there - Windows would be happy as a pig in mud thinking it has a local hard drive and such, and you'll be a very happy IT person with Windows dealing with one set of emulated hardware across all your systems. Then you wouldn't even need a hard drive in these PCs at all, if you have a fast enough file server.

(IN THEORY I believe Windows can boot and run diskless, but everything I've seen is that it's much like Citrix - you're not doing things The Microsoft Way, so now you're in for a world of hurt. I don't know of any organization brave enough to actually run Windows truly diskless)