Re: PXE linux server for Disk Imaging software

maxchock@xxxxxxxxx wrote:

Hi all,

I'm operating a cyber cafe with 50 PCs in my outlet. my daily
maintenance routine, I usually take out the hard disk and put in
another one which have CD-ROM and run ghost version 8 on the bootable
cd.

Don't you have problems with "users" stealing the drives?

These is really a stupid way to do maintenance, so I found out my
motherboard actually have LAN as booting device, so I'm thinking to
setup a PXE/Boot server so all the client PC can connect to the server
for any disk Imaging maintenance.

I don't want to use Windows 2000 as server, i prefer Linux since i'm a
intermediate linux user. But googling on "ghost with Linux PXE" doesn't
return much result.

I understand the idea of using PXE but i'm not clear what program
should i use on server and client.

Can anybody point me out some ideas??

It should be trivial. First you have to create harddrive images for each
machine on your fileserver. The ghost images does not work with the
standard Unix tools. Boot a kernel over PXE, mount a small root partition
either in RAM using TFTP or over NFS. Mount the folder with the images and
use dd or whatever your flavour is to rewrite the harddrive.

If you are really smart, use WOL to boot the machines remotely one at a
time, rewrite the drive, shutdown and continue with the next one. For extra
credit, use SMNP to report any problems back to the server.

--
Lasse Jensen [fafler at g mail dot com]
Linux, the choice of a GNU generation.
.

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