Now I'm asking for some ideas to further "automate" this process.
It would be really cool to be able to control whether the PC boots local or net from the server end rather than at the PC. I guess some configuring in dhcp or tftp might be the answer? Any suggestions?
There is an option for an etherboot menu, which can have a default value controlled on server side. Another option (which did not include restarting dhcpd this and that often) is to load an etherboot from inside etherboot, e.g. always load /tftpboot/eb1 which only is a symlink to a) a default-netboot-etherboot or b) a default-localboot-etherboot. One could trick this further with an etherboot menu program (which e.g. could display a fancy graphic screen too, or require a password for starting recovery functions) - and I really did. I setup a school lab nearly the same way you explained, except I use a more customized ltsp initrd and a kernel with ide support compiled in. If you plan to use such an etherboot menu, contact me, I'll try to find the source code somewhere on my harddisks. It even supported some user-side programming in assembler-like syntax... but I did not finish it. However, it was well suited for that task I primarily intended to use it for.
Next, I understand that some network cards listen on the network and it's possible to issue a "re-boot" command to the PC from the network? Is this true? Any ideas on this one. Otherwise I guess I could do some sort of cron job on the server and at command 10 mins later on the PC, that is simply relies on the server and PC being on about the same time, messy but would work. Or I need somehow to be able to issue a ssh command to an MS os boxen to re-boot (are there ssh servers for MS and even if so, can you re-boot MS from the command line?
Look into the etherboot contrib sections, there is iirc a tool to wake up sleeping PCs (I mean, like atx powered off). This does not work reliably as every hardware vendor does his own stuff, but perhaps it helps.
Shutting down a win98 box from command line can be done with the command rundll32.exe User,ExitWindows (or was it a double ,, ? - I won't reboot, check out yourself). Google will help you to find out the same function for win2k, winnt...
BTDT & HTH,
Anselm
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