OS-Independent Remote Network Boot?

Posted by Cliff on Sunday July 14, 2002 @03:30PM from the cool-features-that-were-missed dept.

driveLess asks: "Local hard disks are a pain, and I'd like to get rid of them. The problem? We have lots of computers running different OSes. Trying to support remote booting for every possible operating system would be a nightmare. The ideal solution would be a piece of hardware (PCI card, etc.) that emulated a drive at the block/sector level and fetched data over ethernet. The PC would think the drive was local, but it would actually be hosted on a server. Although this might sound easy, I haven't been able to find any practical way to do this. (iSCSI looks vaguely possible and might work someday, but it seems premature.) Has anyone else solved (or thought about) this problem?"

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Been around for years by xinu · 2002-07-15 12:41 · Score: 2, Informative

Uh well yeah. Here is how to do Linux, here is how to make a Solaris Jumpstart Server and here is how to run Mac as a diskless node. They all basically use the same methods via bootp... Couldn't even begin to tell you about windows support.