[NCLUG] Question: Linux as a PXE Server

[Marcio Luis Teixeira]

openthinclient.org is distributed as a Java jar file, it doesn't even need to run on Linux, although it can. I think they wrote the TFTP, BOOTP and Management interface portions in Java, and the only true Linux-based component is the boot-image which gets downloaded to the PXE clients. But the part which is important for me, the server side, isn't Linux at all. It's an interesting way of packaging it, as it runs out of the box anywhere where Java is supported, but it is fairly opaque and you really can't tweak it much (I suppose unless you download the code and modify the java source).

I've lately sort of gone down plan B and am playing with Fedora 10 with LTSP (namely, the K12Linux distro). I've resigned myself to simply setting the boot options on the Windows DHCP server. It's not as clean as a separate PXE server, but it does get the job done. Now I can PXE boot into my LTSP box anywhere in my corporate network, which is actually pretty darn sweet! Not all hardware does it successfully, and sometimes the boot is a bit flaky will timeout, but as a proof-of-concept, it works well. It's not as easy to manage as the openthinclient.org solution, but it is more tweakable.

-- Marcio



----- Original Message ----
From: Sean Reifschneider <jafo at tummy.com>
To: Northern Colorado Linux Users Group <nclug at nclug.org>
Sent: Thursday, April 9, 2009 7:55:51 AM
Subject: Re: [NCLUG] Question: Linux as a PXE Server

Marcio Luis Teixeira wrote:
> Definitely worth a try. Putting in individual MAC addresses would be a
> major pain-in-the-ass though. My dream scenario would be one in which

You say you have that openthinclient thingie that does it -- have you
looked at what DHCP process it's running and it's config file to see how
it's achieving it?

Sean
-- 
Sean Reifschneider, Member of Technical Staff <jafo at tummy.com>
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