Re: Servers as appliances

[Sparty Broderick <sparty@upside.net>]

On Sat, 22 May 1999, Rob Bellville wrote:

> At 07:19 5/22/99 -0700, you wrote:
[CHOMP]
> There are probably a few more that we could think of too.
> 
> I thinks its important to remember that the majority of the clients
> accessing this server will be Win/Mac machines. It would be nice to have
> the ability to pop in a boot floppy disk into a client and be able to test
> drive Linux as a client. This might help to show that Linux need not be
> something to be afraid of.

Another thing that might prove useful is a workstation backup system.
Example: we have 14 lab machines here that are identical in setup (and
running Win95 OSR2).  If we could make an image of one HDD on the server
and then dump it back to the machine in an automated process, it would be
nice.  Maybe this even be accomplished with a Linux boot disk--NFS-mount
the server, tar+gz the FAT HDD to a server location.  If the machine needs
to be reinstalled, pop in a Linux rescue disk, rm -rf /fat32/* (or
wherever the FAT partition is mounted), and tar -zxvf
/servernfs/workstation.tar.gz.

Then the human lab monitor would only need to reboot the machine and
change the machine name and IP number.
						--Sparty
web: http://upside.net/~sparty/