DSM-G600, DNS-3xx and NSA-220 Hack Forum
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#1 2007-06-13 19:01:32
Experimental stuff
Hi, new to the board and thought i would make myself known
i go by Da_Blitz on sevral message boards and mailing lists so if you have any other devices like this (mainly ARM) you may have seen me around
my current project is to move all the Drives from my PC into 2 dns-323's and get them set up as netbooting servers so none of the machines in the house need to have a drive, depending on the role it will serve up a server img or a thin client img. hoping to get the RAID happening at a network level (parrellel NFS or some other bizare network filesystem mapped onto lvm)
wondering if anyones intrested in some details of how i do it, has some ideas or has seen somthing simmilar
it actually goes deeper than that but i would wait until i have somthing i can deliver. running all linux at my end with sevral ARM boards
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#2 2007-06-13 20:27:13
- fordem
- Member
- Registered: 2007-01-26
- Posts: 1938
Re: Experimental stuff
I'm not going to say that it can't be done, but I will question why you would want to do it.
Many years ago - when Novell NetWare was the big name in NOS - I worked quite a bit with "diskless workstations" running both DOS and Windows (3.1), and in more recent times with a variety of thin clients, some booting from an image on a server and others from flash memory.
In fact, I've been amused as the IT world has turned full circle from dumb terminals attached to a multi-user mini computer, to so called intelligent workstations (a PC by another name)through thin clients, which are really no more than a more attractive "dumb terminal" displaying a terminal session on a terminal server/citrix metaframe/AS400 box, and finally to "blade PCs" - multi processor minicomputers with remote displays.
In my opinion unless you working with an environment where you have a large number of identical clients - it's not worth the while.
You want suggestions -
make sure you have enough network capacity or you get to watch things bog down when an office full of users all try to boot off of the server at the same time creating congestion beyond your wildest imagination,
make sure you as much physical memory as you can afford in the systems so that you can reduce paging to the bare minimum, because having the page file on a remote disk slows things down considerably
make sure, as far as possible, that all your client hardware is identical so that you can minimise the number of boot images you need to store.
consider booting a minimal linux image from flash memory rather than netboot.
One more question - are you confusing NAS & SAN? These are NAS units and I believe you need a client with an OS that speaks CIFS/SMB or some other form of file sharing protocol to retrieve your files
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#3 2007-07-26 13:51:45
- splat_ed
- New member
- Registered: 2007-07-26
- Posts: 1
Re: Experimental stuff
This is a topic that I'm also looking into. I've got a DNS-323 (1.03 firmware, no fun_plug) and a shiny, new Via Pico-ITX motherboard that I'm thinking about building into an old, small radio case to play MP3s or an iTunes stream from the DNS-323.
Currently my options are (for a very low power machine) either booting from USB/Compact Flash or booting over a network.
I think I'll be able to build using the CF but I was wondering if it is possible to boot from the DNS-323 using PXE?
Any ideas/comments welcome. This is just fun diversion until I think of something else to do with new shinies 
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