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View Full Version : Advice on networking?



tim
11-27-2003, 10:50 AM
OK folks, here's the situation:

I've been a SETI geek all my dc life, and built my farm around a small Linux distro, booted from a floppy. On that floppy (1680 k) I have the guts of a distro, the driver for the lan chip, a dhcp program, the seti cli, and it boots and does it's thing. My floppy boot creates a ram disk, decompresses the stuff on the floppy to ram, and runs everything from there. My router/firewall is the dhcp server. But . . .

The future of seti calls for self-updating executables. I lose whatever is on the ram disk if it crashes or my ups can't keep it rolling. I won't know when they update the software remotely, thus everytime I boot I'll be downloading/configuring new clients.

Besides, what if I want to get into something else? It would be fun to jump into other projects, and few will fit into 350 k tarred and gzipped (that's the space the seti client uses, and about all the space left on the floppy after the operating system). The new seti will likely be larger than the current one anyway, with the new features they're implementing.

I'm a total newbie. I love linux, all but one of my machines run it, and two are dual boot. I know very basic scripting in bash but have relied on dhcp to handle the nuts and bolts of networking for me. I do understand internal ip addresses behind the firewall; I did manage to write a script that would telnet/ssh to each box and tell me the status of each (a major effort for a noob). What I think I would like to know (yes, I'm unsure even about that), is how to boot from a floppy, then somehow log on to a server and use a separate directory there as a working directory for each machine. And then, execute from there and use the server as a remote hard drive, or download to ram and execute, or just what I don't know.

I've read about pxe here some, I've heard about networking file systems a little. I understand some about routing, I have my home network set up so I can ssh in and check on things when I'm out of town. But I get lost fast trying to browse casually to get a feel for what would work for what I'd like to do. I know I could just buy a truckload of hard drives, but a) money b) heat c) it would be cool to learn something new and worthwhile and not spend a) and generate b). I'd rather put a) toward mobos and cpus.

So, what say you? And please bear in mind that I'm a newbie, not dumb, I just have a lot to learn.