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Diskless Nodes HOW-TO document for Linux
v18.0, 25 Jan 2001
This document describes how to set up a diskless Linux box. As technology is
advancing rapidly, network-cards are becoming cheaper and much faster - 100
MBits ethernet is standard now and in about 1 to 2 years 1000 MBits i.e.
1GigBits ethernet cards will become an industry standard. With high-speed
network cards, remote access will become as fast as the local disk access which
will make diskless nodes a viable alternative to workstations in local LAN. Also
diskless nodes eliminates the cost of software upgrades and system
administration costs like backup, recovery which will be centralized on the
server side. Diskless nodes also enable "sharing/optimization" of centralised
server CPU, memory, hard-disk, tape and cdrom resources. Diskless nodes provides
mobility for the users i.e., users can log on from any one of diskless nodes and
are not tied to one workstation. Diskless Linux box completely eliminates the
need for local floppy disk, cdrom drive, tape drive and hard-disk. Diskless
nodes JUST has a network card, 8MB RAM, a low-end cpu and a very simple
mother-board which does not have any interface sockets/slots for harddisks,
modem, cdrom, floppy etc.. With Diskless linux nodes you can run programs on
remote Linux 64 CPU SMP box or even on Linux super-computer! Diskless nodes
lowers the "Total Cost of Ownership" of the computer system. This document is
copyrighted by Robert Nemkin and other authors as listed above. Copyright policy
is GPL. Thanks to Bela Kis bkis@cartan.math.klte.hu for
translating this initial document v0.0.3 (which was a mini-howto) to
English.
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