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Netbooting and Diskless Workstations with FreeBSD

Posted by michael on from the keeping-the-users-from-messing-things-up dept.

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."

4 of 23 comments (clear)

  1. Great stuff by ulib · · Score: 5, Informative

    ... and here's a handy collection of all BSD-related articles published on onlamp. :)
    (I'm posting it because the link is not obvious).

  2. Diskless boot for OpenBSD by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    There is also this for OpenBSD. It is intended for flash booting, but with PXE it can be used to boot diskless systems too.

  3. Funny that this topic comes along... by CoolVibe · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  4. err... the best what? [Re:BSD == good] by ulib · · Score: 5, Informative
    ... I'm gonna be kind, even if sb who calls FreeBSD a "Linux distribution" wouldn't really deserve it. ;-)

    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.

    Nearly 2.5 Million Active Sites running FreeBSD