PXE TFTP thin client
 

hi there,

i'm looking into using a network boot on my network at the moment.

i'm looking for 2 OS's to push out over the network

1. a OS that has a gui with a web browser.
2. one that is just a tiny basic OS that can use rdesktop.

can anyone suggest one of these?

also most of the how-to's i've looked into has said something along the lines that i'll need to know the MAC address of the machine before i can push it out? is that true? i've heard from people about setting wildcards can anyone tell me about that?

does anyone know of a simple startup how-to for using fedora, tftp, PXE and a thin client?

any information what so ever about this subject is wanted.

TO network boot you need two things apart from a working image. A Bootp server and a TFTP server. A netboot host necessarily only know one thing, its mac address. So you need to set your bootp server up to hand out an IP address a tftp server and an image filename. Obviously you don't want to give this same info to any bootp request because it might be comming from another peice of kit so you need to put the MAC into the Bootp server as a means of identifing who to respond to. I also seem to recall that Bootp only works in MAC to IP mappings, I don't think it works with pools like DHCP does, although I may be wrong there because my net-booting experience comes from Nortel switches which always have fixed addresses anyway.

Damn Small linux may do what you want. Other small Distros, off the top of my head, are feather and puppy. I quite like DSL cos its about 56meg and you can boot it from a flash key

I would suggest you look at NX for your thin client protocol.

You can configure dhcpd with tftpd for network booting. Lots of info is spread out on the internet. thinstation linux is one example of a rdesktop client. There are several others. Checkout Linux Terminal Server Project http://www.ltsp.org/ and Thinstation http://thinstation.sourceforge.net/w...ex.php/ThIndex

I have limited experience, I was able to boot thinstation client via a trustix server running dhcpd and tftpd.