Slashdot Mirror
Diskless Booting For the Modern Age
An anonymous reader writes "Ever wonder what happened to PXE? Intel's popular standard for diskless booting hasn't been updated since 1999, and has missed out on such revolutions as wireless Ethernet, cloud computing, and iSCSI. An open source project called Etherboot has been trying to drag PXE into the 21st century. One of their programmers explains how to set up diskless booting for your cloud, using copy-on-write to save space."
I still use PXE to boot a diskless MythTV client. For a while I had the machine connected to a wireless router set up in bridge mode, so the machine effectively netbooted wirelessly.
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
Is it possible to use multicast? The multicast could run continuously or on demand. Can you route multicast?
It would be pretty impressive if one could attach 3 nodes to the network and they all boot up.
It would be a Borg network. Everything you add to it would be immediately taken over!
NODE (DHCP): Hi I'm a Dell workstat- ...
BORG NODE #1 (x.x.3.43): We are borg
NODE: ACK
BORG NODE #2 (x.x.3.44): We wil add your likeness to our own
NODE: RST RST RST
BORG NODE #3 (x.x.3.40): Resistance is futile
NODE: Downloading borg....
BORG NODE #2: We will add your likeness to our own (as soon as you have downloaded.
BORG NODE #4 (x.x.3.45): We are borg.
Slashdot needs Geekcode | Can anyone recommend any good SCIFI? My tastes: Foundation, Startide Rising, CITY, Ringworld,
Good grief, everything is a "cloud" now. Have some servers on a rack? Those aren't servers, that's a cloud! It's like some retards took a Cisco networking diagram, and went crazy when they realized that everything could be simplified into one of the "clouds".
Warning / Rant: The last 5 years of computing have been pretty lame. Concurrency and solutions to it using functional high-level languages are the future. That's where we should have been five years ago when it was so obvious that chips with large numbers of cores were the future. These cloud solutions are just a stupid name for the same old monolithic crap. It doesn't scale and isn't modular in a Unixy way. Modern applications just suck because they're so inflexible. Why can I do so many things from a little text terminal, but I can't easily script the behavior of my web browser without special add-ons? Why aren't modern applications flexible like this, with simple interfaces for communicating with other programs? Where is the equivalent of a shell pipe, in modern applications? It's like somebody threw away all the lessons of the past, and said "But this is the new way, we don't need the old way, because this is new." Fuck that, computing should be better than this. It should be better than these stupid clouds and old piece-of-shit reinvent-the-wheel C and C++ programs with buffer overflows and other ancient problems. Or the HTML / Javascript / whatever jerry-rigged "web applications" that run on some opaque "cloud" that a random company has. Why is it that languages like Smalltalk and Lisp have been around for so long, and nobody learns from them or uses them? It's like the chips keep getting faster and faster, and people keep getting dumber and dumber.
Systemd: the PulseAudio of init systems
It wasn't designed for it - PXE boots without authentication on the client so that the hardware gets the image thinly and then auth takes place when the OS is installed. It assumes control of the local LAN is in place and it is trusted. If you are looking for auth at this level you'd need to look at authentication to the switch or wireless on the network - pre-authentication using something like 802.1X. I'm not 100% clear but I believe gPXE has something that probably covers that in the docs as it has scripting capability pre-receiving DHCP addresses (at the level for wireless authentication and possibly 802.1X)...
The DHCPv6 netboot standard about to come out recommends http as the protocol of choice where tftp would have been used, but uses URLs so the protocol is selectable.
The iSCSI portion of this is a wider standard, implemented by many firmware configurations out of the box.
Finally, I'm going to plug xCAT as a tool to wrap dhcp, dns, ntp, active directory, gPXE, iSCSI, PXE, bootp/tftp, ipmi, blades, vmware, kvm, xen, LPARs, and more to deploy vmware, windows, linux, and aix systems and do hardware management. It mostly pays off at larger scale, but it is a project that aims to understand how to best utilize those various technologies.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.