August 28, 2007 by phillip.

I was curious a while back after looking at my computer boot up to see it trying to get information on how to boot from the network using PXE. This wasn’t a good time of course because what was happening to the computer was an absence of a hard disk made it go through the order of places to find an operating system and when it came up empty it went to a network boot.

The problem was minor because in building the computer I hadn’t yet plugged up the hard disk but this gave me an idea. What neat tricks could I make a computer do if I could just get it to boot up and get its operating system. Needless to say I did a lot of internet searching and found bits and pieces of how to netboot the computer from my server(a good one was https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Installation/WindowsServerNetboot). Needless to say that the floodgates are open.

I got it to work and now I’m thinking of all the things I can do. Entering a machine’s MAC address into my dhcp.conf file can make it boot off of my server and possibly do all kinds of things. I heard of one guy who had lots of Windows computers to install or repair. He had a computer boot up and just start installing Windows on the hard drive. That’s a cool feature for those who have to setup clusters, classrooms, or repair pc’s.

My current obsession is a classroom made purely out of little diskless PC’s. The company Zonbu has a cool one though that they’re selling as a service that they remotely support and put applications on. I’ll definitely keep you posted on any cool ideas I come up with for it.

Posted in Linux, Only for the techy people | 45 Comments »

August 28, 2007 by phillip.

Just a quick appeal to my readers.  Maybe someone can cut the six degrees of seperation between me and a good speaking gig.  I’m looking to start doing speaking appearances to the joys of getting more for less.  My seminar is, “Running a business and your life for free (or close to it).”

I’m sure some venues might want me to work in a little something promoting them as well and that might not be a problem.  Just let me know.

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