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It will only run under PXE boot, so it requires that you have control over DHCP wherever you are.

You might like to try gPXE. You can, either by chainloading SYSLINUX or PXELINUX or using COM32 modules, implement exactly what you describe using almost any medium you desire, whether that's floppy, PXE/DHCP/ProxyDHCP, local disk, USB, etc, configured as you desire, so that as long as it's on any network that can route to your boot server, it'll behave the same every time. You could even burn gPXE directly into the NIC of your target machines, and remove the need for a "virtual partition" altogether. Of course you can set everything up in the DHCP server, or, if you like, point the client at an HTTP server and sort it all out with PHP or something.

Most likely, you're looking to use an embedded script that wants DHCP from the local segment, then contacts a specific server every time, regardless of DHCP settings.

Also, gPXE already supports EFI in addition to BIOS based systems. In the meantime, I'm gonna go look at FOG :-)

It has to have somewhere to put it's VMFS

Well, not in the sense of having no datastore, i simply mean without rotating hard disks present in the server. Flash storage accomplishes that, but you could use gPXE to connect it to an iSCSI target and remotely access its VMFS datastore from there.... if it were possible to do so with ESX, of course. You might not want to swap to it, and it'd really demand another NIC and so on, but that's what I really meant.

That's not Age of Empires, but ATA over Ethernet, a lightweight protocol which would be great for network booting Windows. Does anyone know of a free AoE initiator for Windows XP? The etherboot project already has AoE capability in its gPXE stack: http://www.etherboot.org/

These are theones I found useful

http://www.etherboot.org/wiki/sanboot/debian_and_ubuntu
http://www.s-mart.net/aoe.txt
http://www.coraid.com/support/linux/contrib/vantuyl/aoeboot.txt

There's also the SLAX Aoe boot disk http://www.lbserver.org/aoe/

Here's my writeups

http://maht0x0r.blogspot.com/

> This makes the assumption that school districts use hardware that can
> network boot. I've run into this problem many times. Plus, as cool as
> terminal clients are, it is hard to muster up the hardware to support
> the server side. Remember your budget is often somewhere close or below
> 0.

Most PC's manufactured for approximately the last 8 years have the built in ability to do a "PXE" boot without ever activating a hard drive, cd-rom or floppy. The PXE boot means the machine can boot up an Operating System from across the network. They don't need any Operating system to be resident in the PC itself.

Uses existing PC hardware, COST $ZERO

These machines are the easiest to convert to thin clients because they are already capable of diskless operation.

Now you can remove the hard drive, floppy and cd-rom from the PC, reducing hardware issues and the amount of electricity consumed by PC's. What do you do with all the extra drives? Keep some for spares and sell the rest on Ebay to pay for PXE NIC cards. :-) (see below)

For machines which lack built-in PXE boot capabilities there are several techniques which can be used to give them PXE capabilities:

#1: wipe the hard drive, and image it with a PXE boot instead of an OS Free images here: http://www.etherboot.org/
          Uses existing PC hardware, COST $ZERO

#2: same as number three, but image is on a floppy. (make it permanent by moving the floppy drive inside the case and covering the slot with a normal empty drive slot panel. Set the bios to boot from floppy.
          Uses existing PC hardware, COST $ZERO

#3: Same as 3 & 4, but do it with a cd-rom drive.
          Uses existing PC hardware, COST $ZERO

#4: Add a PXE boot rom to the current NIC cost ~$15-20 per. (Remember that empty socket you see on most NIC's? This is what its for. :)

#5: install a PXE capable Network card, cost ~$20-50 per

#6: Need a large number of boot roms? buy a rom flashing device and blanks roms, download an image from etherboot.org and flash the roms yourself. Cost ~$6 per ROM. Eprom programmer cost ~$40 to "as much as you want to spend". Chances are someone in the district has one you can borrow. Especially if there is an electronics class in the high school.(and if they won't lend it to you, then they can flash the ROMs for you!)

SERVERS: Issue - "We're too poor to buy a server! :( "

RESPONSE: In this case, "server" does not mean what you think.

Typical Thin Client server Needs:

1 GB RAM for every 10 clients
~10 - 20 GB hard drive, any number of clients
Two Network Cards
1Ghz+ CPU

Thin client servers are typically underloaded. Since the diskless client does all the work to display the screen, the server only does the behind the scenes calculations. A 1.3 GHz celeron chip, with 2 GB of RAM can easily serve 20 diskless clients doing web browsing and word processing, fairly memory intensive applications. Given that this is possible, any robustly configured desktop PC, puchased with the last three years can be used for a server as long as you make sure it has enough RAM. Since your diskless clients only absolutely need 64 MB of RAM, you will have plenty to scavenge from to fill up your server. Don't have simms/dimms large enough to get enough RAM in the server because the mainboard only has two RAM slots? Sell the extras (pulled from now diskless clients) on EBAY and use the $ to purchase larger sticks of RAM. COST: 1 GB stick, ~$75 - $150 per.

Got Questions or need help? Want more info? Leave me a message in my jounal.

If you're even considering imaging, please don't. Try unattended. It may take a week or two and a few dozen trial installs but once you get the hang of it you will never want to go back to imaging.

Look at it this way. With unattended, you can assign different profiles to different computers, and they can inherit from each other. Say one group needs x apps, another group needs y apps, and another groops needs x y and z. With unattented that can all be maintained with three very small batch scripts. With imaging you would need to create three large images, and maintain each of them. With unattended, you maintain the master packages and all of your configurations make use of it.

Hardware detection is also easy. When I dealed with cloning I ended up having to keep multiple copies of the same image but configured for each different hardware. With unattended, you extract all the drivers into the $oem$/$1 directory and each computer's hardware is automatically detected and configured during the install. I can easly add any new hardware I want with no additional maintence.

If you need to apply different policies (without AD) learn how to use secedit. It's easy to write secedit and regedit scripts for unattended that will apply all configuration and policies automatically. Microsoft's Windows XP Security Guide covers this well.

Try unattended. You will not regret it.

Also, just as a comment to the above post, it's not neccessary that the NICs support PXE. Etherboot solves that. Etherboot gives a small (15k) image that can be put on a floppy, cdrom, lilo/grub, etc and will boot to PXE. It's not neccessary for the NIC to support it.

most newer machines with an on-board nic (my ecs k7s5a) support pxe boot as an option within the bios. but for older machines, net booting requires either a nic that supports net booting (should have an eeprom on the nic), which are not the cheap nics that i've always bought, or with a floppy (which can probably be burned to a cdr to make a bootable cd).

for net boot floppy images see the section "Making Boot Disks for Legacy PCs" in the k12ltsp client set-up instructions. those instructions reference the rom-o-matic website, which supplies dynamically-generated downloadable boot floppies using etherboot.

so for a small (1.44 MB) simple net boot solution for computers that don't support pxe booting, but with a floppy drive (or bootable from a cd), look at the k12ltsp instructions and visit the rom-o-matic website for a net boot floppy.

ps the images might even be on the knoppix cd as net boot floppy images are (sometimes?) distributed with ltsp, but probably not due to space constraints on the knoppix cd.

We have about 50 Debian boxes, all installed with Systemimager. Basically, it uses EtherBoot to load a kernel/initrd over the network, then uses rsync to do most of the heavy lifting. We had to make a few local customizations, but it has worked quite well for us.