DRBL : The diskless GNU/Linux and MS Windows solution
The speaker
Steven Shiau, leader of the NCHC’s Open Source software development team .
The authors of DRBL are Steve Shiau, Ceasar Sun, Jazz Wang, Thomas Tsai.
Summary
Diskless Remote Boot in Linux (DRBL) provides a diskless or systemless environment for client machines. DRBL has two modes. The first one is NFS-based and works on Debian, Ubuntu, Mandriva, Red Hat, Fedora, CentOS and SuSE. DRBL uses distributed hardware resources and makes it possible for clients to fully access local hardware. The 2nd mode is AoE-based (ATA over Ethernet). This mode supports most OSs such as. GNU/Linux and MS Windows. The client boots via PXE and then switches to gPXE’s AoE booting . When this happens, the remote AoE disk on the server performs just like a local disk with the OS. With a DRBL server in your computer classroom, you can easily run a diskless GNU/Linux and MS windows environment. This will result in a lot of management effort saved by the classroom administrator. In this presentation, we will show you how to configure a DRBL server to run a diskless environment over both GNU/Linux and MS Windows. A live demonstration will also be given to show how the system works.