LinuxSA Mailing list archives

  From: David Newall <davidn@rebel.net.au>
  To  : Paul Schulz <pauls@caemrad.com.au>
  Date: Tue, 8 Feb 2000 11:57:31 +1030 (CST)

Re: Thin clients

> Now that some modern motherboards with 10/100BaseT/TX onbaord also
> have a netboot option in BIOS, the application that I have in mind is
> where a server with the latest distribution has been installed.. 
> a client netboots (getting all its configuration from the server),
> does a hardware scan, and then installs/reinstalls/upgrades a
> distribution (minimal or otherwise) from the network to the local harddrive.

Sun, and I assume "all" of the workstation vendors, have been doing this
since the early 90's.  The client needs a basic UDP/IP stack in ROM, along
with BOOTP and TFTP.  BOOTP is used to discover basic network features,
such as your own IP address, the address of your TFTP server(s), and the
name of your operating system image that you load from your TFTP server.
TFTP, as you no doubt guessed, is used to load that file into RAM so that
it may be executed.

The OS image must be able to mount a network filesystem, e.g. NFS, and
might also need to include a small RAM disk with some binaries to support
system boot.  E.g. you might need access to /bin/sh, or /sbin/mount, in
order to mount a filesystem.