just imagine ...

[foobar]

Hi.
Could you explane me how we could do the following with two (or more) linux boxes ?

It goes like this:

We have one server. Think of the most powerful machine you know, say a 2.8 GHz processor, 8 gigs of ram, six hd's of 80 GB, whatever.
We have at least one workstation, but the trick should work on virtually 1000 workstations at a time.
Every workstation and the server are connected to each other by LAN.

Now i want the workstation to boot from the server, so that the workstation does not need *any* executables to run ! All cmd's like mv, cd, ls and all that stuff are on the server.
This way, the only things that reside on the workstation's HD are personal stuff like settings files, .kwd files, and so on.
Ofcourse, if we would have multiple workstations, only one person can make use of the same workstation.
And on the server side, every workstation's HD could be mounted under the server's /home dir.

Is this possible ? I'm almost quite sure of that, but how would we do so ?

[voidmain]

I used to do this with IBM RS/6000 servers and diskless workstations.  You can do it in Linux as well.  Search for "linux diskless workstation" on google.  I used to do it using bootp, tftp, nfs. Same would probably be used on Linux. Here is the first HOWTO I could find:

http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Diskless-HOWTO.html

Look under section 11. Now diskless workstations are different than X-terminals.  They both can be diskless but the diskless workstation is used like any other Linux/UNIX server except all of their file systems are NFS mounted rather than on local disk.  

With X-terminals the idea is to just get Xwindows loaded on the local diskless machine and export the Window manager from the server to the workstation (xdm remote login). Then all apps are actually run on the server and just displayed on the client. If you have a really fast server, this method would be the best but if your client is fairly powerful then you can do the diskless workstation approach.  

Then of course there is the Linux terminal server project but I don't see much point in it since all of that functionality has existed from day one.  I believe you are interested in the "diskless workstation" approach.

[ August 22, 2002: Message edited by: VoidMain ]

[dbl221]

Thats sounds like a great idea for Cisco routers and diskless workstations but why would you want to do this for your situation???

[voidmain]

Well if you have a fast network it works great. Everyone shares the same "/usr" filesystem.  Makes upgrades a snap.