The Taub Faculty of Computer Science Events and Talks

A motherboard, a CPU, and a memory stick. Add a fan and a power supply, and you have a little computer which boots from network and keeps all its data on a hosting computer's disk through NFS. The shopping list for new components goes as low as 600 NIS, which makes this an attractive solution in cases where a dedicated computer is useful, be it for mission-critical applications, cases where the hardware may be damaged or stolen, or because the OS is bound to crash often (kernel hacking).

This lecture is a walktrough of my own recent experience of setting up a diskless computer, using cobbler for coordinating the PXE boot. It will involve the gory technical details as well as my own insights after making a fullblown Linux system run without any local storage.