Diskless linux nodes

[PCZ]

Help
Do any of you have experience of diskless workstations. ?

I have the motherbords,CPU's etc but no hard disks .
I don't really want the noise/heat of them either.

The problem is my Linux experience is basic [I am an NT admin] and it is hard motivating myself to give it a go.
The learning curve will probably be steeper than the south face of everest.

I have a Tyan Tiger MB for the server and 5 nforce2 MB's with Bartons for the nodes.


Brian

[Welnic]

I have a small diskless setup of 4 nodes running off of one main computer. I used the actual software from this place:
http://ltsp.org/

There is a link in there that had instructions on how to set up such a farm that I used:
http://www.extremeoverclocking.com/articles/howto/FAH_Diskless_Farm_1.html

The main thing that is different is that dFold writes about a 9MB file to the /tmp directory, and the stock setup has only a 1MB Ramdisk for that. You need to either figure out how to make the Ramdisk bigger or how to write the /tmp directory to disk.

This is a collection of diskless farms, I have just browsed this:
http://ws9.jobnegotiator.com/

You can use windows on the main server, both to boot Windows on the nodes or linux. I haven't researched this that much, but I have seen enough to know that it is possible:
http://www.computing.net/networking/wwwboard/forum/10722.html

My farm pictures:
http://rasy.com/home/clint/farmpics/CubeFarm.html

With a stripped down node you can easily run two nodes off of one power supply for a further reduction of heat. A link to how to make a ATX power splitter cable:
http://forums.extremeoverclocking.com/showthread.php?threadid=33884&highlight=ATX+Y+PSU

[PCZ]

Thanks for the links.

I gave it a go, didn't like it and went out and bought some hard disks.

Brian