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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."
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...
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."
"Lot of assumptions, illogical jump to conclusions, wishing headaches to submitter's favorite company's competitors and actually inflecting it on the readers."
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.
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.
Has Linux not been able to do this for years using Intel's PXE (Preboot eXecution Environment)?
There are much, much better examples of network booting than Linux. Solaris for one, and it's old as dirt in computing years. The install media has a working PXE grub image which is integrated with their installer, which makes additional DHCP queries for install configuration. SPARC PROMs do the same thing, although skipping the PXE part. Grub itself will make one DHCP query for the location of a grub.conf, and I guess that's how Linux folks manage network installs, by embedding everything in a smattering of grub.confs across the network. Anyway, doing remote installs is a very common use of net-booting today, then there's Sun's thin client stuff, but I have no idea how prevalent those are. Provisioning has got to be the most common use.
Nobody is accusing net-booting of being new. It would certainly be new, and weird for Apple though if there is any truth to it.
Anyone who's messed around with it much knows theres a lot of room for improvement. Esp. if they use it for more than automated provisioning, that would be significant.
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.
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....
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.
See, this is how the Apple RDF works. You think that this is a new service and that Apple is offering it first when neither are true. There has been a multitude of hardware vendors offering network and internet boot appliances for a long, long time now.
Have you ever heard the phrase "The network is the computer."? If you don't know it's Oracle's slogan. Oracle released a diskless network booted workstation in 1996, the same year that Apple only started offering online storage.
Somehow in the Apple world this means that what Oracle did 14 years ago, and that other hardware manufacturers have been doing all along, somehow magically didn't happen.
Not only that but, being true visionaries, Oracle even put a SUN logo on their JavaStations.
Who cares whether it's encrypted.
Only a few days ago, people were sleeping in late due to a bug on their iPhone.
Apple, like all others, does not make bugfree software.
Do you trust Apple enough to push their latest OS update without any control on your side?
Theoretically, they could break every single iPad/iPhone within a day. Realistically, this isn't entirely outside the realm of possibility.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
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.