On 10/28/20 1:36 AM, Dan Egli wrote: > Hey folks, question. I'm preparing to build a small home network. If > possible, I'd really rather all the computers boot from the server > rather than a local drive. However, despite my searching, I can't seem > to find a way to do that. My first thought was iSCSI, but from what > I've read (and maybe I'm mistaken) that would require a separate iSCSI > "drive" for each computer. Thanks, but no thanks. May as well go back > to individual drives for each computer. So I thought maybe it would be > possible to install onto a samba share and use iPXE or something > similar to boot from there. But I can't find anything for that. I see > plenty of documents showing how to INSTALL from a samba share, but > nothing on how to BOOT INTO THE OS from a samba share. > > I know that on Windows Servers you can setup a common network boot > image, so how do I do that on Linux?
I've heard of installing Windows by PXE-booting a WinPE image that runs the installer. But I've never heard of running Windows itself through a PXE boot, such as is common with diskless Linux setups. If I understand you correctly, you want to run your Windows workstations similar to what Red Hat used to call "stateless." Everything boots off the same read-only image, with per-workstation temporary files stored somewhere else? User's home directories via Samba perhaps? If so, I'm not really sure Windows is designed to work like that. The closest hack I can think of is to PXE-boot Linux, and then use kvm to boot Windows from a shared copy-on-write disk image. Sounds slow though. /* PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug Don't fear the penguin. */
