On Sun, Sep 04, 2011 at 08:56:50PM +0100, Peter Alcibiades wrote:
Question: is it possible to boot an existing system remotely, and if so how do you do it? The case I'm looking at is someone who wishes to just take the disk out of their desktop machine, and install it in a server someplace else in the building (for security reasons, it will be in a different secure environment), but boot from it over the network.
So they would have a diskless workstation booting from their existing hard drive, but remotely.
I suspect that it would be horribly slow.
Wouldn't a more sensible approach be to have a disk on the desktop machine to boot from but to put all the files which they want to be secure on an NFS mounted disk on the server. I.e. simply make /home an NFS mount, a very common set-up.
They'd just have to be careful to ensure that everything that needs security *is* on /home.
Is this possible? Or is there some way of doing something which comes to the same thing? I wondered also if the right way to go about this is xdcmp and remote login from a very basic desktop machine?
That's a similar approach but would be slower.
Modern Linux isn't really designed to run across a network as X was originally intended.