From owner-freebsd-hackers Fri Sep 26 09:50:54 1997 Return-Path: Received: (from root@localhost) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.7/8.8.7) id JAA15543 for hackers-outgoing; Fri, 26 Sep 1997 09:50:54 -0700 (PDT) Received: from pluto.njcc.com (root@pluto.njcc.com [165.254.117.52]) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.7/8.8.7) with ESMTP id JAA15537 for ; Fri, 26 Sep 1997 09:50:50 -0700 (PDT) Received: from khansen.cc.bellcore.com (khansen.cc.bellcore.com [128.96.164.203]) by pluto.njcc.com (8.8.7/8.8.3) with SMTP id MAA18549; Fri, 26 Sep 1997 12:45:25 -0400 (EDT) Message-ID: <342BE6B3.27A5@njcc.com> Date: Fri, 26 Sep 1997 12:45:39 -0400 From: Ken Hansen Reply-To: khansen@njcc.com Organization: Dis X-Mailer: Mozilla 3.01Gold (Win16; I) MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Christoph Kukulies CC: Luigi Rizzo , freebsd-hackers@freefall.FreeBSD.org Subject: Re: diskless 100 Mbit - IntelEtherexpress - Q References: <199709261340.PAA06145@gil.physik.rwth-aachen.de> <199709261243.OAA00131@labinfo.iet.unipi.it> <19970926164123.16634@gil.physik.rwth-aachen.de> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk Christoph Kukulies wrote: > > On Fri, Sep 26, 1997 at 02:43:46PM +0200, Luigi Rizzo wrote: > > the way I do it now is to use a boot floppy with a kernel on it and the > > diskless stuff that Tor Egge wrote and recently (march-april ?) was > > committed. > > > > as an alternative you can boot off a 10mbit/s "ed"-like card and use an > > additional card for 100 mbit/s > > Yeah, but I'd like the raw speed of 100MBit at bootup time also. > Would be very impressive to boot off the net in a few seconds. Where I work we have many unix workstations that have 200-500 Meg HDs that only hold swap & /tmp, everything else is from a file server, very nice arrangement, making these workstations "nearly" diskless. They boot fairly quickly, and even a complete catasrophic HW failure (on the workstation) doesn't harm data. As a by product, a user can log in to any of the workstations and have their environment independent of which machine they are on. This is a fairly common arrangement, but true diskless WS are just one short hop from an X Terminal - I would think about adding a small drive to the PC (how much could a 100 Meg IDE drive cost?) and install the boot config there. BTW I believe Sun has droped support for true diskless workstations, in stead they have CacheFS clients, where the machine boots off the server, but keeps a cache of NFS files accessed on a local HD - that drive is cleared on reboot. Just wnated to throw in my .02 worth. Ken khansen@njcc.com