On Thu, Mar 16, 2017 at 3:02 PM, <the...@sys-concept.com> wrote: > On 03/16/2017 05:58 AM, k...@aspodata.se wrote: >> Thelma: >>> Is anybody running Diskless machine, booting over network? >>> How is the speed? >> >> I've done diskless before but it has been a few years since, >> it was working just fine. Don't remember any specific issues >> once you get it working. >> >>> I have a Gentoo machine running Windows7 via VM. >>> I need to network another PC and connect to that VM so I was thinking >>> setting up Diskless node but never done it before. >> >> You have to ask someone else about diskless MS-Windows. >> > > I think I would "tax" the resources on the serving machine too much. I > would need to run another VM-2 - Windows7 on the server that create > access to VM-1 - Windows7 running the main program on the server. >
Can you clarify what you're trying to do? Are you looking to run windows on a VM on a server as a "virtual desktop" and just access it remotely from a diskless thin client using RDP or something like that? If so there are a few options for this and it is actually a somewhat normal configuration. Indeed you can still buy dedicated thin client hardware that can be configured to do nothing more than boot up and connect to your VM using RDP (or better still something like a Citrix server). Often the thin clients just run linux and a citrix client, but they could also run an embedded windows. They aren't really diskless per se so much as flash-based but they aren't designed for any kind of local storage other than their configuration. The main advantage is that you don't have to worry about employees or such storing data locally since they can't, and they use little power and boot up really quickly and can't get viruses and such. The downside is that they're a one-trick pony and these days there are better options, like rolling your own with a Pi or whatever. Now, if what you want is a diskless linux client there are a bunch of options. It might be used to run RDP and connect to a windows VM just like a traditional thin client. Or it could just do whatever you'd want to do with linux. I was PXE booting a mini-ITX linux box as a mythtv frontend for years until the board died. Typically in this configuration you'd serve the kernel and initramfs via PXE or similar and then mount the root over nfs, but there are other options like iSCSI or even just using a huge initramfs containing your whole OS. However, I'm not sure that is how I'd actually do it these days. A Pi is dirt cheap, so I'd probably just use one of those and the OS is on a flash disk. That makes it pretty easy to back up, and you could install updates from another box. Doing it with Gentoo though would be a little more painful. With my mini-ITX with an nfs root it was easier, since it was Atom-based. I just updated the root filesystem from inside a chroot on more powerful box. I just had to set an appropriate -march so that it would run on both systems. That isn't quite as simple in the pi example unless your build box is a compatible ARM server. You're stuck cross-compiling everything otherwise. -- Rich
