computoman

Caveat: Use at your own risk. Though I use several versions of linux, I like to use Slackware on really old systems.  Generally those systems do not have cdrom and in some cases no usb. Slackare is so versatile that you can boot from just a floppy to install slackware via gpxe from the internet,  I did an install that way with 14.1 on a p1. Now to try this with slackware 14.2.  So far so good. You can do this on other versions of linux. To me one of the most amazing things is to install linux from the internet instead of using local media. Generally if you wanted to do an install of linux, from the net, you would need a dhcp server and an tftp server with special settings. Gpxe gets around all those limitations. Quite often I will start a internet based install from a local web server. Now that the internet is slightly more dependable we can do an install from the host linux distribution sites. Today I will show you how to do it with Slackware 14.2.  More I...

  Arch Linux Netboot Live System The Arch Linux netboot environment allows booting Arch Linux live media directly over the network. It will boot into a menu where you can choose from a list of available mirrors. The image will be downloaded into memory. Requirements: A computer that connects to the internet via LAN and DHCP. If your ethernet NIC is not supported by iPXE, you must use your NIC's netboot capabilities. This is only possible if you select "Boot from network" in the BIOS and configure your DHCP server to load the PXE image provided below . In this case, the UNDI driver will be used for downloads until Linux is booted. The first stage of the download can be extremely slow. Test netboot with qemu Download an iPXE kernel image. ipxe.lkrn Graphical Menu ipxe_text.lkrn Text Menu Run qemu with the kernel image: qemu -m 1G -kernel ipxe.lkrn Boot with any Linux bootloader Down...

Linux Debian is kind of taking of the reigns of being one of the most popular linux distros. Like installing any operating system the traditional way, you can run into roadblocks.  For example, you may not be able to burn a linux cd, the machine you want to load linux on has a broken cd/dvd rom, or a host of other reasons. What we are about to do is what is known as pxeboot networking. Another words we will use a web server to get us started with a linux install on a system. Traditionally you actually had to have several servers to do the network install. You had to modify a Dhcp (Ipaddress servers) server,  a Tftp (boot files) server, and among other systems which general required a lot of setup and the blessing of the system administrator, Tried this with the python web server, but you have to have all the files in one directory from what I could see.  I just did not want to take the time to do it. $ python -m SimpleHTTPServer I went ahead and used the Apache...

According to this news report from https://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9221717/PC_makers_should_brace_for_drive_shortages , hard drives will be in short supply for about a year. How can you get around that? There are several ways to do it. Some of which I have talked about a little before. Well you operate the computer without a hard drive. At first that seems ludicrous. but it is actually very viable. There are two ways that this can be done. Both are based on what is known as the PXE or pre-execution environment where the hardware in the network interface card can load all or part of an operating system into a computer from the network. A major advantage of using diskless clients is that all software management can be one from virtually just one point. All software maintenance and upgrades are done on the server(s). That means, you do not have to send out a software technician to a user's desk to maintain the software on their system. Reduced Information technology suppor...

Well fortunately, I had a system I was building to replace oesrvr1. Pulled the hard drive from that machine and installed it in oesrvr1. After making a few adjustments, The system was serving the main page and a few other things. Since I needed to replace a lot of software anyway. It was not a big deal all the applications were not installed. The lamp services and phpmyadmin were installed and they was the most important. Began to restore files.  Etc etc etc. Anyway, the real reason I needed to have to old server back up again was to take advantage of what is known as GPXE. Gpxe is the open source version of the pre-execution environment that allows a computer to boot into a working environment without a storage system in use or enabled. This usually entails having special network card in a computer system that contains enough information to boot into the network. PXE has been around a long time. Normally if you turn on your computer, you will hear a hard disk drive whirl up to spe...