On Tue, Jan 20, 2009 at 11:57 PM, <[email protected]> wrote:
> My Goal is to make it so they boot, and open a webpage via
> active desktop or a page in Firefox, as well as have VNC
> enabled.
LTSP can do all that.
> On the image side, I want to put in a drive, build the machine in either
> Ubuntu or XP.
LTSP doesn't work by hard disk imaging. Instead, it boots and runs
the remote stations as diskless clients. It basically sends a Linux
kernel and network card driver to the client via PXE. Once the kernel
is running, it mounts all its filesystems from the LTSP server via NFS
(Network File System). By analogy to the Windows world, this would be
like having your C:\ drive be a Windows file share, except Windows
doesn't have that capability. This method is actually a lot easier
and efficient, since you don't have to have entire static hard disk
images sitting around. You just have regular files in the server file
system.
> Any changes will obviously be lost on boot, but that's where the web page
> will come in as it can be controlled & changed.
You can do this through normal filesystem permissions and user
config with LTSP. It's also easy to change and script things, since
it's all just in the server filesystem. Try it, you'll like it. ;-)
> My idea was something simple like Fog, but it doesn't seem to let you boot
> from an image you made to it.
It's not a Fog limitation, it's a Windows limitation. Regular MS
Windows requires a writable block device ("disk drive") with a
writable system partition ("C:\") on it. It doesn't understand the
concept of running from a network.
Now, there are network block device drivers. They essentially turn
a disk image file on a server into something the client sees as a
writable disk drive. Windows doesn't know that the block device is
actually an image file being transported over the network. This is
what AoE (ATA over Ethernet) and iSCSI (SCSI over IP) are all about.
They're kind of inefficient, though. Modern hardware often overcomes
their inefficiencies, but I dunno how well the older stuff you have
will work.
There's also the whole WinPE (Windows Preinstallation Environment)
thing, but I don't know much about how that works. It might be
suitable for the task you describe. Or maybe you can net-boot BartPE
or something. But I'm just guessing here. LTSP, I've done myself.
-- Ben
~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~
~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~
