[NCLUG] PXE booting...

[Matt Taggart]

davet at frii.com writes...

> So, I have this mini-itx board that I'm using at home to do some various
> data acquisition projects around the house. I have a database I stuff this
> data into on another system. So, I was thinking, that since this thing
> will PXE boot, I thought that I could simply download an OS and initrd and
> run the thing totally out of memory without having to using a local
> disc/CF card, what ever. From what I've read this should be possible, no?!

I did this with a Via Eden mini-ITX, using an NFS root so I could have a full 
Debian install. It worked pretty well and made zero noise. I added a gigabit 
network card to be able to talk to the NFS server as fast as possible (making 
the bottleneck the disks on the server).

I think some of the Via mini-ITX boards are supported by the LinuxBIOS 
project, that's something I've been meaning to try on there, could make 
booting really fast.

There's also this I saw recently,

http://www.hermann-uwe.de/blog/linuxbios-with-x11-server-completely-in-flash-ro
m

-- 
Matt Taggart
matt at lackof.org