Network Installation Question
 

Hello,

I am an IT admin for a medium-sized business with about 300 workstations. I am new to the world of *nix and would like to show my supervisor the benefits of using a Linux for users who only use their system to access our corporate Intranet (a PHP/MySQL based web site that I developed), use a word procesor, and send/get e-mail. Currently, our internal servers run IIS with PHP mods. I have had FreeBSD installed on one of my home computers for a while and use it for testing purposes. Hopefully, with Linux, we will be able to reduce the costs associated with Windows and Office.

I have two how-to questions:

First, what is a good a basic *nix distro that will allow me to boot a Linux kernel from a CD and access either an NFS share or an FTP location on our LAN, transfer the installation files for FreeBSD to that computers hard drive, mount the ISO image, and then begin the install? The majority of our workstations have 3Com EtherLink XL NIC's.

Second, I would like to find a way to make a folder on our Win2k3 server accessable to our Linux clients via NFS for the purpose of getting the installation files. If this cannot be done, then I'll just put them in an FTP folder.

Thanks in advance for the help and I would like to hear any suggestions that you may have.

-Jake Mertel

Hi,

as for the distro, I sometimes use Knoppix.
It's a Debian based live CD distribution, which can do all you talked about and much more.

As for the nfs question, I only know it runs on the Server version of windows OS (and on Linux too, of course). Usually, NFS is quite easy to install (less to secure).

Hi Jake,
I'm not used to work with heavy windows environment but, looking to your configuration, I would suggest you to give a look at Thinstation. You can start the substitution of the windows stations with it.
To access the windows folders all you need is to share the folder and use the samba client in the linux.

Thanks!
 

fr_laz: Perfect, thank you very much :)

osvaldomarques: Not quite what I need, however I did try this out and think we could put it into use in the future... I know there's some outdated hardware around here that would be perfect for RD clients.

Thank you both so very much.

-Jake Mertel