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Apple Patent Hints at Net-Booting Cloud Strategy
An anonymous reader writes "Apple has received a patent that hints at the intent of providing network computers that will boot through a 'net-booted environment.' It may seem that Apple is moving slowly into the cloud computing age and that it has many assets that are simply not leveraged in what could be a massive cloud environment that could cause more than just a headache for Google and Microsoft. However, it appears that Apple has been working for some time on an operating system, conceivably a version of a next-generation Mac OS or iOS, that could boot computers and other devices via an Internet connection."
"Cloud"?? How innovative!! You missed the boat on THIS one, Microsoft! Hahaha!
Wait...
Booting off a network is nothing new. You've been able to buy NICs with ROMs that enable you to boot off the network for decades.
Has Linux not been able to do this for years using Intel's PXE (Preboot eXecution Environment)?
Anyone got an English translation of this? It's giving me a headache.
I hope they implement some kind of security so Comcast can't give you their 'customized' version...
No doubt. This technology is only appropriate in tightly controlled environments such as a corporate LAN. The problems with doing it over the public Internet range from noisy/slow/dropped connections to DNS redirection to "h4x0rpr0m.img". Insanity.
I have something in common with Stephen Hawking...
and after decades of with this capability, what percentage of capable systems actually do this? ... very few.
who would want this w/o strong encryption either: Maybe a telephone company, and their vendor locked in phone. "oh i'm sorry, it wont work w/o the net boot OS"
Troll, Troll, go away and flame again some other day
Having spent the last decade deploying a very homogeneous collection of hardware around the world, the idea makes some amount of sense as an evolutionary step. I don't see this happening in PC-land (Windows-based or or otherwise) because of huge variations in hardware configuration. I can definitely imagine Apple moving to cloud-booting ipads/iphones/imacs/appleTV's/whatevers. Of course, at that point who really owns (pwns) your hardware? Hmm.
Apple have NetBoot, just simply press 'N' on boot to boot up over a network.
Time Warner Cable.
It's slow as old folks fucking, and yes I've done a personal comparison.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
... it will be called borgboot.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Yup, one of my office computers is a diskless iMac that boots from a network server. Works fine.
I imagine a tech support nightmare for supporting the Gentle Users. It couid work OK for IT professionals.
I don't see this for mobile devices for the unwashed masses however...
On the contrary, I'd argue it is exacly for unwashed masses. Because, the l337 IT proffesionals may use this by tricking the iPhone to boot from their "cloud" and "temporary jailbreak" their phone (reverting afterwards to the Apple/intercom cloud when they like), they won't be scared by a patented method.
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
Apple will spend $50 million in advertising and after 2 years they'll have the majority of the world convinced they invented net-booting. (This article representing the first $20k of that.)
And that's exactly what this continuation of a 1999 patent covers: NetBoot of the original iMac. This is a non-story published by yet another blog that doesn't know how to read patents.
I'll never understand why something that caused so many users so much trouble is heralded by some as innovative.
While most PC makers approached the aging floppy disk situation by first offering to leave the fdd out, then making them optional but not the default, and then making them available on select models, and only then ceasing to offer them, Apple dropped support entirely with no regard for their own users.
This is an example we are to hold in esteem?
-Lod
and after decades of with this capability, what percentage of capable systems actually do this? ... very few.
I have quite a few systems that boot from SAN.
And PXE boot is very handy for installing or when you want to boot off of a virtualized floppy.
No need to install aftermarket botnets.
Apple has been offering cloud services since around 1996 when they ditched floppy drives and offered online storage instead. Sure, this is new, but to imply they're playing catch up by "moving slowly" when they offered cloud services before MS or any other consumer OS reseller and are offering new services like this first is a bit retarded.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
From TFS:
This sentence means absolutely nothing. Editors are supposed to edit the content that appears on the site, not just act as gatekeepers. :-/
The last thing we need is more patent FUD. The patent is quite clear on what it's intended for:
2. Description of the Related Art
Most organizations currently employ local area networks (LANs) of thick clients, e.g., personal computers. While this represents an improvement over the disconnected computing environments of a decade earlier, many limitations still exist. In current LAN environments, each client computer has its own local copy of operating system software, application programs, and user customizations to the desktop environment. Typically there is no centralized mechanism for maintaining a consistent system configuration in such a computing environment. Consequently, individual user workstations often get out-of-sync with each other as one or more users upgrade to newer versions of the operating system, upgrade their application programs, or install application programs that were not part of the original system configuration. Additionally, in this type of uncontrolled, decentralized environment, the operating system of a client computer can easily become corrupted. This is especially true with the Microsoft.RTM. Windows.RTM. 95, 98 and NT operating systems where user modification of a single system file can have undesirable consequences and require significant downtime. For example, editing the Windows Registry file could render a client computer unusable thereby requiring reinstallation of the computer's operating system software and all the application programs.
In view of the foregoing, it should be apparent that administration and maintenance of current computing environments is complex and time consuming. Therefore, what is needed is a reliable computing environment that can be maintained more easily and at a lower cost.
This has nothing to do with cloud computing. This has everything to do with managing a large net-booted environment, like a large corporation with a few thousand workstations. From reading the patent's claims, it's a design for a net-boot server that maintains separate boot volumes for each client class. Those volumes can be modified on the fly, without the need for carefully creating images.
TFA implies that this may be a technology for Apple to have more control over iPods and other devices, by keeping the OS internal and possibly charging a subscription fee to keep the device booting. With today's systems, that's ridiculous. Downloading a whole working OS is impractical over current residential networks, and it kills one of the best features of handheld devices: they're ready at a moment's notice. It simply doesn't make sense for Apple to expect users to wait for a half an hour every time they turn on an iPod.
The more reasonable in TFA speculation is that this is a push to have a bigger corporate Apple presence, but that's glossed over in favor of more outlandish claims.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
As with so many Apple "features", this is about control. It does mean that you can run the main part of the OS on a powerful server somewhere, but in this case it would be Apple's server. Think you didn't own your iDevice before? Hard to jailbreak a device when the OS isn't even local anymore.
and after decades of with this capability, what percentage of capable systems actually do this? ... very few.
Right, because it was a dumb idea when it was originally developed and hasn't improved with the passage of time.
Bootable USB and MicroSD have rendered it obsolete and only the Control Freaks at Apple would want you to boot over the air from the cloud that they control.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Holy run-on sentence, Batman! Buzzwords aplenty, too.
On-topic: meh. This has existed for ages in local networks, as have the means to secure this over the Internet. I would guess the reason it hasn't been done yet is that it's just not very practical, bandwidth-wise. So, unless Apple has something very novel/unusual up their sleeve, I fail to see why this is particularly interesting.
They aren't patenting booting from a lan.
They are patenting booting over an internet connection.
And If you ask me, this has nothing at all to do with corporate, and has everything to do with Apple wanting Joe Sixpack's ipad/iwhatever to merely be an extension of Apple Inc, with nothing for Joe to fiddle with other than the one big on/off button.
You were dead on about the tightly controlled bit. You just forgot who the patent was issued to.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
http://www.google.com/patents/about?id=I8V6AAAAEBAJ
The article is wrong with the dates as you can see in the patent described in the article it was filed in 1999 and granted in 2006 but the article stated it was filed in 2006, and granted recently. This gave the author reason to believe that this has something to do with what apple is doing next which seems unlikely since they have had the idea for over 10 years and have done nothing with it.
Also from the article it sounded much like a Net-boot Linux distribution with a NFS shared holding the file system to be used. Something like my school has set up for student computers. This gave me an impression of patent trolling/prior art as it has been in place since 1997 at least. But it does make some alteration to what i have seen in practice, for one there are 2 places where a user can make changes to the OS, first is a network stored diff file system which tracks the changes from the end users system and settings files. So that a user can make changes to the programs installed and OS files (not that they have good reason to do so) this is then compared with a master OS image, this i would assume allow a user to have the same programs and settings across any computer. There is also a Local Shadow Volume which stores larger files which cannot be stored on the server due to quota restraints, caching of regularly used files and server write queues. Possibly also can be used to a disconnected client although they don't appear to state how much of the master FS is transfered to the client to make it usable if the network is disconnected.
That being said it can be seen as similar to what Google is doing in Chrome OS but chrome only boots from the server to restore the OS and not to boot every time. Also Chrome OS uses the local copy as the primary and the network copy as a backup but apples patent seems to imply the opposite.
Given the age of the patent this article appears to be someone trying to make up news during a slow week more than anything else.
Anybody remember Plan9? A not fully developed idea in it was of an anonymous workstation. The workstation would behave like a caching terminal which could run applications. Since it merely cached from the file server, and the same apps ran on all hardware, you could move from station to station without an active sync.
The hierarchical storage mechanism in Plan9 was almost instantly recognizable in TimeMachine. Basically, all data from workstations dribbled towards file servers which snapshotted to optical storage. To go back to where you were yesterday, just involved mounting your workspace with a /yyyymmdd/ in the path.
That would make alot more sense than an internet wide bootp....
What trouble was caused for users? People were already using zip drives and CD-Rs by then, and not to be condescending, but the Mac userbase had likely already shifted away from floppies, being full of creative professionals who dealt with documents larger than 1.44 MB on a regular basis.
And that means a nontrivial bandwidth requirement.
If these do come out, and and get popular, then the ISPs get to decide if they like the bandwidth usage...
Nice. I like being able to boot without a network, thanks.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Yeah I got that. What I said was doing that anywhere *but* a LAN is insane.
I have something in common with Stephen Hawking...
iSCSI operation against a writable snapshot of a lun. Or various nfsroot solutions for linux. Or probably a number of other things...
This patent was filed in 2006, back when Apple was taking enterprise semi-seriously. Expect the validity of this one to be a moot point as Apple ignores it.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
and after decades of with this capability, what percentage of capable systems actually do this? ... very few.
No, lots and lots. It's extremely common for OS installs on both servers and clients, and also typical for Citrix/Terminal Services dumb terminals.
Probably 80% of the computers in our organisation have been netbooted at least once.
i personally knew several Mac users who were not pleased by the change. My uncle, a huge Mac guy had trouble with the transition, our high school computer lab who somehow purchased several new machines without realizing their entire "hand in your assignments on a floppy" system was screwed, etc.
i certainly remember much weeping and gnashing of teeth from the mac people i knew, but perhaps my experience was atypical. didn't know any "creative professionals", just normal folks who weren't too pleased with the deal.
-Lod
BOOTP over a Cloud, or an Internet Server via HTTP? Is this truly innovative? LAN cards have been able to do it for years as well. Yes, not a "Cloud" but an Intranet..
Wait, DEC VAX Workstations could boot into a VMS Cluster across a network..
Again, how is this truly innovative other than the image repository is "not on my local network" and the transport "can be unreliable?"
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
very few home systems use it. quite a bit of home systems have had the capability.
tons of enterprise systems have a use for it.
that doesn't mean it adds anything new. if apple has a "cloud capable os" that actually has any traction, it will defeat any reason to even consider mac hardware.
Such as on an airplane? Or when my router needs a reboot? Or when my ISP fails periodically? Why would I want this? Are there no security implications? Consumers might be that stupid, but techs should not be.
They were dead when Apple stopped shipping systems with them. And they merely shifted the burden to the user who had to buy a USB floppy drive. So it went from standard to optional. Note how when I word it that way it turns into the more graceful method you think PC makers used.
Given Slashdot's track record predicting Apple's imminent failures, I'd bet on this being a success based on the number of people in this thread claiming it's nothing new and that no one would want this.
The crimes of eBay are a disgrace to it's pig latin heritage!
Sun's SunRay workstation worked the same way. Boot off the net, instant access to your work at a meeting exactly as you left it in your office, including 3D graphics streaming from a GPU server. Ahead of its time in so many ways. I miss Sun.
Unless Apple has in mind to change their OS to a very slim size, you are absolutely right: this is a show-stopper for the patented technology, no matter for which market segments.
And, of course, unless Apple knows something that we don't about how ISP/Telecom will bill their clients and expand their network/bandwidth.
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
Apple has discovered that they don't like selling hardware. iTunes gets them more profit margin. They kill the Xserve line, and make a virtual product that any computer can use, and which probably requires iTunes microtransactions to run/install software.
not really. there was a huge variety of software that didn't work with USB floppies. maybe not so much on the mac, i wouldn't know.
-Lod
Huh? Netbooting is anything but a dumb idea. Used all the time in enterprise situations. It makes the lives of admins much easier.
I find netbooting incredibly useful. I frequently netboot new virtual machines. Or machines to which I have no physical access other than a network-based KVM.
I was about ask you to name something that didn't work with a USB floppy, and then I noticed you had switched the topic from Macs to PCs. That might be the reason that PCs held onto them for so long. MacOS was able to take advantage of the fact that a floppy was treated similarly to a flash drive or any other virtual drive -- just another storage medium, rather than requiring special handling.
I suppose I should have said that flash drives and other virtual drives (images, for example) were treated the same as a floppy, but the point remains the same. The MacOS file system is handled significantly differently from the CP/M style used by Microsoft.
I'd say it's coming soon. Apple isn't going to restrict the success of the iPad by chaining to a PC for that much longer.
...that time before the 80's when your files and OS were on the network and you had to use that dumb terminal thing?
Basically it replaces whatever network protocol used to be for TCP/IP over internet.
How can this possibly be worth a new patent?
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
Every running workstation could distribute a fraction of the boot to the starting up ones. Central server (lighter than ever) would be the root distributor for new versions and the validator of the digital signature of each piece for all the running versions. Version upgrade would be forced seamlessly for new runners from central server. The distribution shouldn't be the booting filesystem but the booted memory image to speed it up, or at least most of it. This can apply to applications too.
This idea cannot be patent-trolled. If not patented yet, it is released as (CC) by me and this post is registered in slashdot servers as a proof of previous concept against the troll.
My Apple IIgs has the ability to boot via an AppleTalk network-hosted boot image. Apple has had this on the Macintosh since the late '90s with Mac OS 9, and Mac OS X has supported it since its introduction. Just hold down 'n' during boot on any Open Firmware or EFI-equipped Mac, and it will try to netboot. And netboot.me provides a minimally-assisted INTERNET-based netboot for any gPXE computer. It is even possible to configure an OpenWRT-compatible WiFi router to send the proper netboot.me assistance, so you don't need any "infrastructure" on your premises at all, just your internet modem and router.
Another non-functioning site was "uncertainty.microsoft.com."
The purpose of that site was not known.
the problems with USB floppies had nothing to do with the operating system on the hard drive of the computer. the problem was booting the operating system *on the floppy*
again, maybe macs didn't have that problem. all of this is really missing the point, which is that many Mac users felt Apple had abandoned them again when they made the move to drop floppies. It was not met with rejoicing and celebration, it was not considered a great move.
only now looking back have macholes managed to spin something that was not appreciated even amongst their own ranks into some example of apple "leading" the industry. it's ridiculous.
-Lod
Those iPads and iPhones and iPods and Macs and Macbooks aren't the hardware devices you are looking for (theatrical wave of hand).
Anyone who felt "abandoned" is an idiot and deserves whatever happens to them.
Apple did not go around and destroy existing Macs when they introduced the iMac. The lack of a floppy was an advertised feature. Only the most stupid people would buy one and not know they needed an external drive.
Dropping floppies may have caused pain, but it was well worth it.
According to Apple fanboys, like multitasking, cloud computing and network booting is a disaster, horrible, awful... until Apple invents it first!
My computer (Fedora 12) already does this. It involves putting a boot strap image onto the harddisk of my laptop. I then boot it up, and it downloads the bits of the OS it needs. It caches these parts to disk, for faster booting next time. Now I come to think of it, even Windows does this. I don't have any Apple computers, so what do they do? ;-)
Support would be part of the package no doubt.
It's only a patent and as we know each patent is just another land mine in the minefield of corporate greed.
Centralized network booting is a great idea...as long as you're in control.
All the new "cloud" concepts of centralization are actually really good ideas, the problem is that instead of using these ideas to make things better and easier, vendors use them to lock their customers in.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
The biggest issue was USB floppy drives couldn't read the Mac 800K GCR formatted DD disks that were still randomly hanging around.
and after decades of with this capability, what percentage of capable systems actually do this? ... very few.
Right, because it was a dumb idea when it was originally developed and hasn't improved with the passage of time.
Bootable USB and MicroSD have rendered it obsolete and only the Control Freaks at Apple would want you to boot over the air from the cloud that they control.
Yeah because we all know that distributing thousands of USB or other Flash media units is so much easier than booting from a server or servers (not). It's hardly a 'dumb idea' and netbooting is something that has been and will continue to be used by quite a few enterprises.
Maybe it's a dumb idea if you are in Mom's basement, but in the real world having ways to manage images/OSes across many client devices matters a lot in some instances.
Now I'm not saying I think doing it from a third party via 'the cloud' (I hate that term) is necessarily a good idea. That would depend upon the implementation and the specific needs of the user segment(s) being addressed. I'm just saying that your statement is totally false when viewed as a generalization.
Hasn't everyone been trying to guess what the big data center they are building is for? Well, this could be the answer you're looking for... TFTP booting has been around since the days of Xterms, maybe even before then.
It makes perfect sense for user-recovery as well. Imagine this: You've dropped your macbook, and now it won't boot from the HD, but can automatically default to net-booting into a utility that will attempt to repair the HD. It will also allow you to boot into a stripped down OS that allows you to copy all your important files to a USB stick or maybe to a ".mac" cloud destination.
The current Macbook Air doesn't eve have a HD -- it uses flash. Just imagine how much thinner they'll be able to make that computer if all it is, is a screen, keyboard and some wireless networking. Then it really will be a Macbook "Air" -- the whole machine becomes a true "netbook" in that it boots and runs from the internet.
Just wait until Apple figures out how to power it from the network as well. No batteries needed.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
uh, go loko at gtall's comment.
they *have* to sell hardware. They have literally set themselves up to do so. By not selling hardware, there's also less compelling reasons for apple products.
Jobs will finally leverage his synergies to bridge the gap between the mobile and desktop paradigms.
Oh, hell. Three suitspeak buzzwords in one sentence. Be still, my heart. This was once a forum for nerds, not newly-enrolled MBA students...
... what in the world would make me want to trust an operating system that isn't even located on my computer and is being loaded onto my computer without my at least having had a chance to check it? Am I supposed to just trust Steve Jobs? Ri-i-i-ight.
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
The patent is for managing net-boot machines. That's useful for large numbers of similar machines, like a big corporation or a big cluster. It has almost nothing to do with virtualization, nothing to do with time management, and nothing to do with load distribution.
Then there's a few more details getting in the way. The patent was files in 2006, about five years before the Xserve line was discontinued.
If the technology were to be used by Apple internally, there'd be no need to patent it. It'd really only be useful for managing the data center itself, so why disclose their internal tools to competitors more than 5 years ahead of time?
Finally, there is a replacement for Xserve, announced in November. It's the Mac Pro Server. Not quite the same, but certainly enough to manage a corporation.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.