Linux at school with notebooks 5112

If the notebooks are new enough, they should support PXE, which allows computers to boot off the network (instead of disk-CD-floppy). You can then use the very old network-booting technique in Unix, but using newer protocols and software. It basically works as follows.

1) PC-Notebook boots the ROM stored on the network card instead of harddisk. (You may need to change some BIOS settings, or simply press some magic function keys (e.g. F12) during POST.)

2) The program in the ROM implements the PXE standard. It would set up the network card and then use it to send out packets to ask a DHCP server for an IP address, subnet mask, gateway addres, DNS server address, NTP server address, ... AND the address of a "BOOT server" and an "image name" to boot.

3) The ROM then uses TFTP to download a boot image using the "image Name" from the "BOOT server".

4) The ROM then transfers control to the boot image, which can be a linux kernel.

5) When the linux kernel gets control, it boots, and then sets up and mounts an NFS directory as the root filesystem.

6) initscripts (from the mounted NFS directory) are now available for end. These scripts would initialize other parts of the computer, such as mounting home directories (if that's not handled by automount).

A system so booted up would usually use tmpfs or ramdisk fortmp. One could even set up swap files on NFS (or using ndb device), although that'd be slower than local disks.

The advantage of such a system is the low admin cost: software upgrades only need to be done in the NFS directory, not individual computers. Kernel upgrade is as simple as replacing the boot image with a new one (or using simple symlink tricks). And nothing needs to be installed on the client machines!

Have a look at PXE booting. Some distros such as Knoppix already has such a thing. You just need to know how to set it up. (Once you've set up a Knoppix PXE server, you would be able to boot Knoppix from any PXE-able machine, even without the Knoppix CD!)

Network card boot-ROM, DHCP (a improvement over the old BOOTP), NFS-mounted root are the keys to your answer. Google around and I believe you'll find much information. It needs some experimentation, though. Have fun!

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