Date: Fri, 26 Sep 1997 12:45:39 -0400 From: Ken Hansen <khansen@njcc.com> To: Christoph Kukulies <kuku@gilberto.physik.RWTH-Aachen.DE> Cc: Luigi Rizzo <luigi@labinfo.iet.unipi.it>, freebsd-hackers@freefall.FreeBSD.org Subject: Re: diskless 100 Mbit - IntelEtherexpress - Q Message-ID: <342BE6B3.27A5@njcc.com> References: <199709261340.PAA06145@gil.physik.rwth-aachen.de> <199709261243.OAA00131@labinfo.iet.unipi.it> <19970926164123.16634@gil.physik.rwth-aachen.de>
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Christoph Kukulies wrote: > > On Fri, Sep 26, 1997 at 02:43:46PM +0200, Luigi Rizzo wrote: <snip> > > 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
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