It helps to have the client set up in its final configuration before you start.

At least one PXE-bootable system (the client).An Ubuntu system with (preferably) nfs-kernel-server and tftpd server (the server).There are a lot of parallels to ThinClientHowto, diskless booting requires a DHCP server which a bootable PXE network card will query to get its configuration and location of the file to tftp from the server, after booting the PXE image the client will tftp and boot the kernel image(with args specified in the pxe config), those args will tell the kernel how to configure itself, and the path to mount the NFS share where its / directory is located. Oliver Grawert says :- you could have achieved this easier by following the thin client howto, remove the ltsp-client package from the chroot and install ubuntu-desktop (or whatever desktop you want) there, would save you a lot of configuration work ) It is different enough to have multiple machines mounting the same root filesystem as opposed to simply being a remote monitor and keyboard to warrant a separate how-to I think. This works better if you have full powered PC's to work with, and are working with a large number of clients that would require too much CPU and RAM to run all their applications on one server. Thin clients use some of the same principles but they also connect to a remote X session, which means everything runs on the remote server - all applications will consume the servers resources, such as RAM and CPU cycles.ĭiskless Booting simply uses the remote server for storage and still runs all applications on the local client station. How is this different than ThinClientHowto? The same goes for updates and many other operations. Imagine my case I admin about 25 public workstations for a local library, if they want something changed across the board I can either go sit at each PC and spend X minutes on it, adding up to who knows how many hours, or I can simply make the change at any one of the 25 systems and have it affect every system equally. How is this different than ThinClientHowto?ĭiskless booting is using a remote system or systems to store the kernel and the filesystem that will be used on other computer(s).

Ip booting tool