[Live-demo] experimenting with PXE netbooting a lab full of PCs

[Alex Mandel]

On 05/31/2011 02:00 PM, Hamish wrote:
> Cameron wrote:
>> I assume it would be valuable for running a workshop where
>> you need to quickly configure computers.
> 
> Exactly. After a bit more thought it may be considerable more
> trouble that just burning 1 DVD per computer, but my next ideas
> are (a) boot from DVDs but the "master" computer also has a NFS, samba, sshfs, or httpfs+fuse (does such a thing exist?) share
> which could serve up the session's sample dataset to everyone
> without the need to stuff it on to the main osgeo live DVD.
> And (b) in situations where anything outside their experience-
> adverse IT admins are reluctant to let us reboot from a non-
> Microsoft DVD, but would have less trouble installing an Oracle
> product: if we install VirtualBox on all the PCs in the lab, how
> easy is it to then connect the VMs up the teacher's NFS data
> directory? Would it be possible (@Brian?) to ssh into those
> Windows7 hosted VirtualBoxes from the teacher's one? [yay `screen`
> + ssh-keygen for being able to help diagnose things without
> having to steal the keyboard from the student & not have 30 ssh
> xterms open]
> 
> 
> I'd still love to hear from someone who's got experience with
> PXE though, as maybe it holds something.
> 
> 
> thanks,
> Hamish
> 
> ps- inspiration:  http://pareto.uab.es/mcreel/ParallelKnoppix/


Here's what I've done so far similar to these ideas:
Get IT to install Virtualbox on all the lab machines.
Load up one machine with the VM, install the additions tools and setup a
generic share to the host system (including fstab mounting to a folder
in the user).
Have the IT staff clone the 8 GB file + the virtualbox config to all the
other machines.

I used that for a 14 person class this quarter and a 25 person workshop.

Where I plan to go in the future is actually to get a cloud running on
some servers, and deploy desktop to that and then use the desktop either
as real thin clients or via remote desktop as virtual thin clients.

Enjoy,
Alex