DRBL (Diskless Remote Boot in Linux) is a NFS-/

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server providing a

diskless A diskless node (or diskless workstation) is a workstation or personal computer without disk drives, which employs network booting to load its operating system from a server. (A computer may also be said to ''act as a diskless node'', if its disks ...

or systemless environment for client machines. It could be used for * cloning machines with

Clonezilla Clonezilla is a suite of open source drive cloning, drive imaging and system deployment utilities used to simplify deployment and maintenance of a group of computers. Clonezilla Server Edition uses multicast technologies to deploy a single im ...

software inbuilt, * providing for a network installation of Linux distributions like Fedora, Debian, etc., * providing machines via PXE boot (or similar means) with a small size operation system (e.g., DSL, Puppy Linux, FreeDOS). Providing a DRBL-Server * Installation on a machine running a supported Linux distribution via installation script, *

Live CD A live CD (also live DVD, live disc, or live operating system) is a complete bootable computer installation including operating system which runs directly from a CD-ROM or similar storage device into a computer's memory, rather than loading fro ...

. Installation is possible on a machine with

Debian Debian (), also known as Debian GNU/Linux, is a Linux distribution composed of free and open-source software, developed by the community-supported Debian Project, which was established by Ian Murdock on August 16, 1993. The first version of D ...

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Red Hat Linux Red Hat Linux was a widely used Commercial software, commercial Open-source software, open-source Linux distribution created by Red Hat until its discontinuation in 2004. Early releases of Red Hat Linux were called Red Hat Commercial Linux. R ...

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already installed. Unlike LTSP, it uses distributed hardware resources and makes it possible for clients to fully access local hardware, thus making it feasible to use server machines with less power. It also includes

, a partitioning and disk cloning utility similar to Symantec Ghost. DRBL comes under the terms of the

GNU GPL The GNU General Public License (GNU GPL or simply GPL) is a series of widely used free software licenses that guarantee end users the four freedoms to run, study, share, and modify the software. The license was the first copyleft for general us ...

license so providing the user with the ability to customize it.

Features

DRBL excels in two main categories. Disk Cloning

(packaged with DRBL) uses

Partimage Partimage is a disk cloning utility for Linux/UNIX environments. Partimage can save partitions in many formats to a disk image. Utilities such as Partimage are useful in a number of situations which are commonly encountered by network administrator ...

to avoid copying free space, and

gzip gzip is a file format and a software application used for file compression and decompression. The program was created by Jean-loup Gailly and Mark Adler as a free software replacement for the compress program used in early Unix systems, and in ...

to compress Hard Disk images. The stored image can then be restored to multiple machines simultaneously using

multicast In computer networking, multicast is group communication where data transmission is addressed to a group of destination computers simultaneously. Multicast can be one-to-many or many-to-many distribution. Multicast should not be confused with ...

packets, thus greatly reducing the time it takes to image large numbers of computers. The DRBL Live CD allows you to do all of this without actually installing anything on any of the machines, by simply booting one machine (the server) from the CD, and

PXE PXE may refer to: * Preboot Execution Environment, booting computers via a network * Proof and Experimental Establishment, an Indian defense laboratory * Pseudoxanthoma elasticum, a genetic disease * Pentium Extreme Edition, a variant of Pentium D ...

booting the rest of the machines. Diskless node A diskless node is an excellent way to make use of old hardware. Using old hardware as

thin clients In computer networking, a thin client is a simple (low-performance) computer that has been optimized for establishing a remote connection with a server-based computing environment. They are sometimes known as ''network computers'', or in th ...

is a good solution, but has some disadvantages that a

diskless node A diskless node (or diskless workstation) is a workstation or personal computer without disk drives, which employs network booting to load its operating system from a server. (A computer may also be said to ''act as a diskless node'', if its disks ...

can make up for. * Streaming audio/video - A

terminal server A terminal server connects devices with a serial port to a local area network (LAN). Products marketed as terminal servers can be very simple devices that do not offer any security functionality, such as data encryption and user authentication. ...

must decompress, recompress, and send video over the network to the client. A diskless node does all decompression locally, and can make use of any graphics hardware capabilities on the local machine. * Software that requires real-time input - Since all input at a

thin client In computer networking, a thin client is a simple (low-performance) computer that has been optimized for establishing a remote connection with a server-based computing environment. They are sometimes known as ''network computers'', or in th ...

is sent over the network before it is registered by the operating system, there can be substantial delay. This is a major problem in software that requires real-time input (i.e.

video games Video games, also known as computer games, are electronic games that involves interaction with a user interface or input device such as a joystick, game controller, controller, computer keyboard, keyboard, or motion sensing device to gener ...

). Diskless nodes run the software locally, and as such, do not have this problem. DRBL allows one to set up multiple

s with relative ease.

How it works

The client computer is set to boot from the network card using PXE or Etherboot. The client requests an IP address, and tftp image to boot from, both are provided by the DRBL server. The client boots the initial RAM disk provided by the DRBL server via tftp, and proceeds to mount an nfs share (also provided by the DRBL server) as its root (/) partition. From there, the client boots either the linux distribution on which the DRBL server is installed, Clonezilla, or an installer for various Linux distributions, depending on how that particular client was configured on the DRBL server. All system resources reside on the local machine except storage, which resides on the DRBL server.

Keys to a successful diskless node environment with DRBL

The main bottleneck in a DRBL installation is between the storage on the DRBL server, and the client workstation. Fast storage on the server (RAID), and a fast network (Gigabit Ethernet), are ideal in this type of environment.

External resources

DRBL

Clonezilla

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Diskless Remote Boot In Linux Booting Network booting Provisioning Embedded Linux Linux software Operating system distributions bootable from read-only media