I love the rapid boot sequence of Etherboot and LTSP, particularly getting to a rapid command line on run level 3, but I need to mount the local hard drive on my "diskless" client so that I can do maintenance. I understand that floppyd can be used to access the local floppy, but how to access the local hard disk?
Maybe, as noted in another post, LTSP is not really the solution I need. Here is my situation, for what it's worth -- any input, $0.02 -$0.98, would be welcome. I teach at a high school and my curriculum includes giving students some work in MS-DOS, Windows 95 and Linux (I'm using Debian). On any one day, I have about 60 students, 20 in each of three bells. I am searching for a clean and tidy (and open source) solution that will enable me to back up workstations to a known configuration -- High School funding what it is, Norton Ghost (Corporate) and VMWare are not currently possible. Using Etherboot and LTSP, I have been able to provide a Linux desktop to the students and, for this, LTSP works superbly well. My unanswered problem is how to (for example) take an image of a Win95 partition or MS-DOS partition and rapidly restore this image onto a student workstation hard drive. As a minor success, I used Tom's Root Boot (1.7MB floppy) to get access to the workstation hard drive and tarred the contents into a file that I then made available on my Linux server. Again using Tom's at the station, I mounted the server using NFS, downloaded the tar file and untarred it into /dev/hda1 (the workstation hard drive). I even wrote a shell script (my first) to automate the steps. And MS-DOS boots! HOWEVER, Tom's Root Boot loads from floppy (read: slowly) while Etherboot and LTSP get me to the command line very quickly. Also, Tom's requires that I login and swap floppies to run my shell script -- I'd like to automate both of these and I've seen how quickly LTSP responds. Problem is, I have not been able to mount the HDD after booting to LTSP run level 3, so I can't do maintenance on it. Any ideas or suggestions? Wow, I'm rattling on. ------------------------------------------------------- This SF.Net email sponsored by: ApacheCon 2003, 16-19 November in Las Vegas. Learn firsthand the latest developments in Apache, PHP, Perl, XML, Java, MySQL, WebDAV, and more! http://www.apachecon.com/ _____________________________________________________________________ Ltsp-discuss mailing list. To un-subscribe, or change prefs, goto: https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/ltsp-discuss For additional LTSP help, try #ltsp channel on irc.freenode.net
