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Netbooting and Diskless Workstations with FreeBSD
sootman writes "O'Reilly's ONLamp site has a neat two-part series on building a netboot server and diskless workstations with FreeBSD. Nothing too earthshaking but it's always an interesting topic and it's nice to see a new writeup on it every so often."
Nearly 2.5 Million Active Sites running FreeBSD
... and here's a handy collection of all BSD-related articles published on onlamp.
(I'm posting it because the link is not obvious).
...does it run Linux?
There is also this for OpenBSD. It is intended for flash booting, but with PXE it can be used to boot diskless systems too.
Read the subject loudly. You'll understand (probably).
On the dragonflybsd mailing lists there's a big thread about using PXEboot to netboot the new installer so machines without spindles or floppies can install dragonflybsd. Lots of info on how to set up DHCP for booting pxe-enabled machines. Might also be worth checking out.
Yet another sickening blow has struck what's left of the *BSD community, as a soon-to-be-released report by the independent Commision for Technology Management (CTM) after a year-long study has concluded: *BSD is already dead. Here are some of the commission's findings:
.005% of internet servers. A recent attempt at a face-to-face summit in Boulder, Colorado culminated in an out-and-out fistfight between core developers, reportedly over code commenting formats (tabs vs. spaces). Hotel security guards broke up the melee and banned the participants from the hotel. Two of the developers were hospitalized, and one continues to have his jaw wired shut.
Fact: the *BSDs have balkanized yet again. There are now no less than twelve separate, competing *BSD projects, each of which has introduced fundamental incompatibilities with the other *BSDs, and frequently with Unix standards. Average number of developers in each project: fewer than five. Average number of users per project: there are no definitive numbers, but reports show that all projects are on the decline.
Fact: There are almost no FreeBSD developers left, and its use, according to Netcraft, is down to a sadly crippled
Fact: X.org will not include support *BSD. The newly formed group believes that the *BSDs have strayed too far from Unix standards and have become too difficult to support along with Linux and Solaris x86. "It's too much trouble," said one anonymous developer. "If they want to make their own standards, let them doing the porting for us."
Fact: DragonflyBSD, yet another offshoot of the beleaguered FreeBSD "project", is already collapsing under the weight of internal power struggles and in-fighting. "They haven't done a single decent release," notes Mark Baron, an industry watcher and columnist. "Their mailing lists read like an online version of a Jerry Springer episode, complete with food fights, swearing, name-calling, and chair-throwing." Netcraft reports that DragonflyBSD is run on exactly 0% of internet servers.
Fact: NetBSD, which claims to focus on portability (whatever that is supposed to mean), is slow, and cannot take advantage of multiple CPUs. "That about drove the last nail in the coffin for BSD use here," said Michael Curry, CTO of Amazon.com. "We took our NetBSD boxes out to the backyard and shot them in the head. We're much happier running Linux."
Fact: *BSD has no support from the media. Number of Linux magazines available at bookstores: 5 (Linux Journal, Linux World, Linux Developer, Linux Format, Linux User). Number of available *BSD magazines: 0. Current count of Linux-oriented technical books: 1071. Current count of *BSD books: 6.
Fact: Many user-level applications will no longer work under *BSD, and no one is working to change this. The GIMP, a Photoshop-like application, has not worked at all under *BSD since version 1.1 (sorry, too much trouble for such a small base, developers have said). OpenOffice, a Microsoft Office clone, has never worked under *BSD and never will. ("Why would we bother?" said developer Steven Andrews, an OpenOffice team lead.)
Fact: servers running OpenBSD, which claims to focus on security, are frequently compromised. According to Jim Markham, editor of the online security forum SecurityWatch, the few OpenBSD servers that exist on the internet have become a joke among the hacker community. "They make a game out of it," he says. "(OpenBSD leader) Theo [de Raadt] will scramble to make a new patch to fix one problem, and they've already compromised a bunch of boxes with a different exploit."
With these incontroverible facts staring (what's left of) the *BSD community in the face, they can only draw one conclusion: *BSD is already dead.
It is becoming more and more obvious that FreeBSD is the best Linux distribution out there. Why don't more people use it, and why don't we hear more about it in the media?
....who read that as "dickless workstations"?
a) FreeBSD is Berkeley Unix, Linux is a Unix-clone. They look similar to the average user, but deep inside they're two quite different things.
b) the media tend to identify Open Source OS's with Linux because of the community hype - GNU & Linux are about politics as well, thus they attract a wider range of people. BSD is a purely technical and academical thing. These different commitments are well reflected in the 2 licenses: BSD (much simpler and less restrictive) and GPL (an anti-proprietary political manifesto).
c) FreeBSD is quite widely used and, notwithstanding the lack of hype, its user base is growing pretty fast.
sounds sweet.. i love the diskless technology.. there were some great Debian packages that made diskless booting a sinch.. simple NFS booting.. i can imagine it working much better with FBSD..
i wonder if anyone has worked on a virtual architecture for diskless clutering applications? to me, besides saving a decent amount on hard drives, the only true advantage to diskless booting, is utilizing the theory of clustering, using things like load balancing..
- Hi I'm Linus Torvalds and I pronounce Linux, Lih-nix..