Diskless Remote Boot in Linux: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 11:19, 6 October 2021

Revision as of 22:47, 12 February 2022

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[[Clonezilla]] (packaged with DRBL) uses [[Partimage]] to avoid copying free space, and [[gzip]] to compress Hard Disk images. The stored image can then be restored to multiple machines simultaneously using [[multicast]] packets, thus greatly reducing the time it takes to image large numbers of computers. The DRBL Live CD allows you to do all of this without actually installing anything on any of the machines, by simply booting one machine (the server) from the CD, and [[Preboot Execution Environment|PXE]] booting the rest of the machines.

'''HybridDiskless Clientnode'''

A hybriddiskless clientnode is an excellent way to make use of old hardware. Using old hardware as [[thin clients]] is a good solution, but has some disadvantages that a [[hybriddiskless clientnode]] can make up for.

* Streaming audio/video - A [[terminal server]] must decompress, recompress, and send video over the network to the client. A hybriddiskless node does all decompression locally, and can make use of any graphics hardware capabilities on the local machine.

* Software that requires real-time input - Since all input at a [[thin client]] is sent over the network before it is registered by the operating system, there can be substantial delay. This is a major problem in software that requires real-time input (i.e. [[video games]]). HybridDiskless clientsnodes run the software locally, and as such, do not have this problem.

DRBL allows one to set up multiple [[hybriddiskless clientnode]]s with relative ease.

==How it works==

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All system resources reside on the local machine except storage, which resides on the DRBL server.

==Keys to a successful Hybriddiskless Clientnode environment with DRBL==

The main bottleneck in a DRBL installation is between the storage on the DRBL server, and the client workstation. Fast storage on the server (RAID), and a fast network (Gigabit Ethernet), are ideal in this type of environment.