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OS-Independent Remote Network Boot? 25

Posted by Cliff from the cool-features-that-were-missed dept.
driveLess asks: "Local hard disks are a pain, and I'd like to get rid of them. The problem? We have lots of computers running different OSes. Trying to support remote booting for every possible operating system would be a nightmare. The ideal solution would be a piece of hardware (PCI card, etc.) that emulated a drive at the block/sector level and fetched data over ethernet. The PC would think the drive was local, but it would actually be hosted on a server. Although this might sound easy, I haven't been able to find any practical way to do this. (iSCSI looks vaguely possible and might work someday, but it seems premature.) Has anyone else solved (or thought about) this problem?"
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OS-Independent Remote Network Boot? More

OS-Independent Remote Network Boot?

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  • Posted 40 minutes ago:

    "Has anyone else solved (or thought about) this problem?"

    Nope.

    First post. :-P
  • I'd love such an invention. Heck, I'd pay damn good money too!

    I've looked into that sort of thing before, and came up nach.

    I've seen a peice of software for windows that does this called boot-nic. [vci.com]It's not exactly cheap tho'... they seem to have this really dumb-ass idea where their market it. Quite sad really.

    While linux isn't impossible to setup for remote booting, I don't know of any resonably priced solution for Windows 2000/XP.

    Hmmm
  • I think it was some kind of bootrom plugged in the NICs. PXE something I think.

    Anyway, it was emulating a floppy disk (replaced drive A) until it could load enough network drivers to boot Windows 95 off a remote HD. Since the content was (AFAIR) simple DOS drivers for the NIC and a bootstrap for Windows (config.sys and autoexec.bat mostly), I don't see why you couldn't boot other OSs with it. Of course, I don't have a product name so it might be difficult to find it. :(

  • Been around for years (Score:2, Informative)

    by xinu ( 64069 )
    Uh well yeah. Here is how to do Linux [tldp.org], here is how to make a Solaris Jumpstart Server [introcomp.co.uk] and here is how to run Mac as a diskless node [utah.edu]. They all basically use the same methods via bootp... Couldn't even begin to tell you about windows support.
  • Simply boot a linux X-terminal (Like LTSP) and set it to run VMWARE with windows whatever for certain workstations, and VMWARE and whatever other OS for others.
    I have never tried this before, but it should work in theory
    In theory, In theory, doesn't communism work?
    --Homer Simpson

  • Possible Answer (Score:3, Interesting)

    by autocracy ( 192714 ) <slashdot2007&storyinmemo,com> on Monday July 15, 2002 @11:22PM (#3891594) Homepage
    Well, no matter how you look at it, you either have to install this emulation into the windows code (fat bloody chance), or you must emulate the disk below the windows level. Bochs looked interesting, but comments indicate it does everything in software and is hence slow. Plex86 seems promising though; it takes a VMWare approach to emulation by natively doing as much as possible and 'virtualising' the rest - pretty fast.

    I'd opt for booting a minimalist Linux over the network that starts Plex86 with a network image as the hard drive. In this manner, I suspect you can do damned near whatever you want, including emulating CD drives.

    Sites: www.plex86.org [plex86.org]
    bochs.sourceforge.net [sourceforge.net]

  • Assuming it's to get the drives centralised or easier physical access rather than wanting them virtualized somehow, this Sounds like a good fit for fibre channel. You could have an array of drives and a switched network to connect the machines (within 10km IIRC). With the right filesystems you could even share drives between machines/do backups from another machine (I'm not sure how well that would work on non-unix systems though).

  • not for windows... (Score:2, Insightful)

    by dJCL ( 183345 )
    I've seen some solutions for this. Anything but windows is easy to do. When I was at UofWaterloo I think they had hard drives in the windows systems that just rewrote themselves each boot, so that does not work for you. I know that you can remote boot DOS, novell did that I think. I have some boot rom's here that will load a floppy image and boot it, so put dos there.

    Someone mentioned, boot dos and then load windows, could work for the 9X/ME line of windows.

    I was reading Kuro5hin the other day and someone was describing his inside view of some microsoft work, and he did mention remote boot of win2k. But that might have been just remote install...

    My best suggestion: get the code for the etherboot project(or whatever it is called, it open source...) and modify it with some hard drive emulation code. Those things load into memory just like a dos .sys file - ie they act like bios, just override the bios HD routines and run them throu the card... I don't know enough to do it, but would use the results if they exsisted.

    Good Luck.

  • http://www.rom-o-matic.net/

    Just pick your ethernet card and away you go.
  • Do a google search for PXE boot and add the O/S of your choice. Or even diskless boot.

    There's loads of stuff out there for Windows (Intel Landesk), Linux FreeBSD etc.

  • It's pretty much already been said here, but you will need to go into the BIOS and set "wake on lan" and put the network card first in line for booting. There is also software (eg. rbfg.exe)that will create a network boot disk, but using a boot floppy will of course mean someone has to be with the client.
    PXE NICs are your best bet.
    How many different OS's are you running? Must be nice to work with diversity!

  • Missing the boat. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Webmoth ( 75878 ) on Tuesday July 16, 2002 @12:18PM (#3894952) Homepage
    A number of posts here re: PXE-type boot, terminal server, etc. That's not what the poster wants.

    Think virtual hard drive and controller. Something that FOOLS the OS into thinking there's an actual, physical, grinding, chattering, clunking, blinking, belching, farting hard drive in the computer. Complete with cylinders, heads, sectors, earwax, and belly-button lint. Something that shows up as /dev/sda in *NIX environments. Something that has its own network support so the system can appear as a stand-alone computer if you want it to.

    I know of no PXE boot ROM, no terminal service, nothing of that sort that does this. If there is, we want to know!

    What's the use for it? Well, I don't really know, and if I had one it would probably be in that big cardboard box in my garage but i'm sure it would be cool, and that's reason enough for me.
    • It's not that people aren't getting it.

      It's that there isn't what the poster wants.

      And really, it doesn't *REALLY* require a special network-drive controller, he just wants diskless stations, and to support many.

      He just suggested that a network-drive controller would be a way of killing more ducks with one gun.

      Now, Tangentally, Here's another Idea I have:

      Take Linux, add Wine, but using your current version of windows, use as many original DLLs as you can, thereby preserving as much Windows Code as possible.

      Now, hang on flameboys, before you explode... If you are going to run Windows anyway, wouldn't it be nice if it were under Linux, if possible?

      The question is: If you load Original MS DLL's into WINE, how compatable can you get?

      I personally don't like to use VMWare when I don't have to, as it's not exactly the smoothest solution.

  • Where I used to work we solved this exact problem using serial controlled power strips. These power strips had a number of outlets and a serial port, and you simply connected one computer to the serial port and using basic (scriptable) commands you could get it to power on and off any one or all of the power outlets.

    Course you still have to worry about graceful shutdowns, but in this case these were machines with no remote access (at the time) - like Windows and Mac machines, so there was simply no way of cleanly shutting them down.
  • Seriously, trying to netboot a pc is just too hard to do to be practical. Get something that's been designed to be netboot, then you'll realise just how easy things can be. It's soo much easier to boot up a sparc (stop+a, "boot net") than it is for a pc (install boot rom, realise that there are too many limitations to be practical).

    I once was considering attempting to get a pc to net boot, I gave up after a few hours of reading the documentation that read just as well as a if it had been written in klingon then translated to zulu.

    Don't even get me started on some of the protocols needed (pxe which I have no clue about vs. bootp/dhcp + tftp & nfs).

    So, if you want to net boot something, go out and invest in some sparcs, hppa's, sgi's, alpha's, or even mac's. You'll save yourself from soo much stress that way.
    </rant>

  • IBM Haifa has developed iBoot, which does this. Unfortunately, it's not open source. See here [ibm.com]

    What would it take for an OSS solution ? iBoot runs over iSCSI which will eventually be common. iSCSI would require a TCP/IP stack plus iSCSI BIOS extensions.

    But maybe someday that will all be part of standard BIOS, and will work with motherboard ethernet. This is cool stuff, at least I think so (I submitted an iBoot story several weeks ago, but it wasn't accepted).

  • And to prevent users messing with it, just keep the whole drive, floppy and all, completely *inside* the chassis. Hey its crude, but is easy and cheaper than the PCI card option you were thinking of. If your users do require a floppy drive for their own use, you could add a second one inside on the same cable. You'd have to physically write protect the floppy though- so "firmware upgrades" ;-) over the network are not an option.

    If space is an issue, how about a cheap compact flash card hanging off your IDE cable? CF cards already have IDE electronics built in, and the interface to the ID connector is trivial (one pin needs to be shorted IIRC). Don't know if write-protection can be turned on and off by a network client though.

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