Thank goodness! Up and running again.
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 speed and eventually the computer boots to your operating system locally. PXE allows you so to speak to have a remote hard drive. No hard drive on the system means less labor and maintenance costs.
There are several ways to achieve remote booting. The traditional was was to load enough software on the client or desktop machine to use what is called a terminal services client so to speak. The terminal server that all the client computers talk to does all the heavy lifting and the client computer is virtually a dumb terminal. No server and you can not use your client computer. As servers and clients have become more powerful. you actually now can have remote hard drives (sometimes this is know as AOE or ISCSI). So no one has to come to your desk to fix your software. All support (updates and corrections) can be done remotely!
For the reason I wanted to use the gpxe is sort of a combination of above. Traditionally you had to have several servers set up for you to serve out what you need at the desktop (i.e. tftp and dhcp). That can be time consuming and cause problems in more complex environments. GPXE allows you to use just a web server (like the one you are connected to now) to get your harddisk so to speak. That means from anywhere on the planet with internet access. you have access to your hard drive. That means you do not have to have a hard drive with you when traveling. A security bonus if some foreign country wants to take your computer. They do not get your hard drive and or data!!!!
One of the things, I have done is as a tech to install or reinstall computers for clients. That usually means I have to carry around a lot of software with me. With a web server to dole out the software, nothing virtually has to be taken with me. On older computers this can be a challenge though, as might at least need a usb stick, floppy, or minimal cd/dvd rom to boot the remote system.
Today I needed to install the operating system on a computer that only had a hard drive. I temporarily hooked up a floppy drive to get to the gpxe web server. Made sure the computer was hooked to the internet and had access to the web server that had the gpxe startup software. Booted the floppy in the computer and was instantly hooked up to a network install of the Debian linux operating system. The boot up took under a minute. To say the least clients are amazed when they see you do that. They usually ask where the boot operating system cd is. I do not need it anymore. One caveat, If where you are booting from has slow network and or slow internet, then you have to do things the old fashioned way.
Example at:
http://www.instructables.com/id/Almost-diskless-boot-from-a-web-server/
For more info, check out:
www.etherboot.org
www.romomatic.org
LTSP.org
Forgot to mention that with proper setup you can have a client or an employee of the client insert the floppy or etc into the machine to be installed or upgraded and then remotely via vnc or the like you can do all the setup. Centos and Redhat linux has allowed you to do that for a long time.
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 speed and eventually the computer boots to your operating system locally. PXE allows you so to speak to have a remote hard drive. No hard drive on the system means less labor and maintenance costs.
There are several ways to achieve remote booting. The traditional was was to load enough software on the client or desktop machine to use what is called a terminal services client so to speak. The terminal server that all the client computers talk to does all the heavy lifting and the client computer is virtually a dumb terminal. No server and you can not use your client computer. As servers and clients have become more powerful. you actually now can have remote hard drives (sometimes this is know as AOE or ISCSI). So no one has to come to your desk to fix your software. All support (updates and corrections) can be done remotely!
For the reason I wanted to use the gpxe is sort of a combination of above. Traditionally you had to have several servers set up for you to serve out what you need at the desktop (i.e. tftp and dhcp). That can be time consuming and cause problems in more complex environments. GPXE allows you to use just a web server (like the one you are connected to now) to get your harddisk so to speak. That means from anywhere on the planet with internet access. you have access to your hard drive. That means you do not have to have a hard drive with you when traveling. A security bonus if some foreign country wants to take your computer. They do not get your hard drive and or data!!!!
One of the things, I have done is as a tech to install or reinstall computers for clients. That usually means I have to carry around a lot of software with me. With a web server to dole out the software, nothing virtually has to be taken with me. On older computers this can be a challenge though, as might at least need a usb stick, floppy, or minimal cd/dvd rom to boot the remote system.
Today I needed to install the operating system on a computer that only had a hard drive. I temporarily hooked up a floppy drive to get to the gpxe web server. Made sure the computer was hooked to the internet and had access to the web server that had the gpxe startup software. Booted the floppy in the computer and was instantly hooked up to a network install of the Debian linux operating system. The boot up took under a minute. To say the least clients are amazed when they see you do that. They usually ask where the boot operating system cd is. I do not need it anymore. One caveat, If where you are booting from has slow network and or slow internet, then you have to do things the old fashioned way.
Example at:
http://www.instructables.com/id/Almost-diskless-boot-from-a-web-server/
For more info, check out:
www.etherboot.org
www.romomatic.org
LTSP.org
Forgot to mention that with proper setup you can have a client or an employee of the client insert the floppy or etc into the machine to be installed or upgraded and then remotely via vnc or the like you can do all the setup. Centos and Redhat linux has allowed you to do that for a long time.
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