Idea
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@scottalanmiller said in Idea:
This is a pretty standard set up. This is basically how we ran the school that I built in the early 2000s. The system image was pulled fresh over the network and ran in memory. Very effective.
In the modern world how would you accomplish this? What would you use?
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@Dashrender said in Idea:
4-8 GB for the OS? what OS are you running so lean on?
RHEL/CentOS can do useful things with ~500MB for a complete system. Depending on what they're doing, 4GB for the system drive could be more than enough for years to come.
@johnhooks Do you use a separate partition or mount point for /home? Generally you'd encrypt the home (data) sections and leave the OS as a standard install. Things like encfs make this easy to do. Encrypting everything takes more work and monkeying around with LVM, copying everything, etc.
At least with LVM, you should be able to get everything done on a live system. Yeah, it lets you do things like this.
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@travisdh1 said in Idea:
@Dashrender said in Idea:
4-8 GB for the OS? what OS are you running so lean on?
RHEL/CentOS can do useful things with ~500MB for a complete system. Depending on what they're doing, 4GB for the system drive could be more than enough for years to come.
@johnhooks Do you use a separate partition or mount point for /home? Generally you'd encrypt the home (data) sections and leave the OS as a standard install. Things like encfs make this easy to do. Encrypting everything takes more work and monkeying around with LVM, copying everything, etc.
At least with LVM, you should be able to get everything done on a live system. Yeah, it lets you do things like this.
We automount home from NFS. Only thing that's actually on these systems is the root partition and we have to separate /var, /var/log, and a couple others for SCAP.
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@wirestyle22 said in Idea:
@scottalanmiller said in Idea:
This is a pretty standard set up. This is basically how we ran the school that I built in the early 2000s. The system image was pulled fresh over the network and ran in memory. Very effective.
In the modern world how would you accomplish this? What would you use?
All you need is a PXE capable network interface on the workstations. It's not exactly easy, but very doable for anyone that knows Linux.
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So it's kind of ridiculous that we need to encrypt the drive on the workstation since there is nothing on it. But we are forced to. Logs are also sent to an rsyslog server, so if I can just do away with the drive that would be nice ha.
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@wirestyle22 said in Idea:
@scottalanmiller said in Idea:
This is a pretty standard set up. This is basically how we ran the school that I built in the early 2000s. The system image was pulled fresh over the network and ran in memory. Very effective.
In the modern world how would you accomplish this? What would you use?
Like this for example:
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@johnhooks said in Idea:
So it's kind of ridiculous that we need to encrypt the drive on the workstation since there is nothing on it. But we are forced to. Logs are also sent to an rsyslog server, so if I can just do away with the drive that would be nice ha.
I'd almost just setup network boot then. Everything uses the same system image/software. If you need to add/update software, you do that and then save the results as the new system image.
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@travisdh1 said in Idea:
@wirestyle22 said in Idea:
@scottalanmiller said in Idea:
This is a pretty standard set up. This is basically how we ran the school that I built in the early 2000s. The system image was pulled fresh over the network and ran in memory. Very effective.
In the modern world how would you accomplish this? What would you use?
All you need is a PXE capable network interface on the workstations. It's not exactly easy, but very doable for anyone that knows Linux.
So I'm building a pretty robust VM host server to be used as a test environment. Any recommendations as far as a multi-port PXE capable NIC? Not to highjack the thread.
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@wirestyle22 said in Idea:
@travisdh1 said in Idea:
@wirestyle22 said in Idea:
@scottalanmiller said in Idea:
This is a pretty standard set up. This is basically how we ran the school that I built in the early 2000s. The system image was pulled fresh over the network and ran in memory. Very effective.
In the modern world how would you accomplish this? What would you use?
All you need is a PXE capable network interface on the workstations. It's not exactly easy, but very doable for anyone that knows Linux.
So I'm building a pretty robust VM host server to be used as a test environment. Any recommendations as far as a multi-port PXE capable NIC? Not to highjack the thread.
I'd challenge you to find a multi-port NIC that doesn't support PXE! I stick with Intel NIC add in cards when I have the choice, I've had some driver headaches with Broadcom cards over the years. xByte and Stallard Tech are where I'd be looking if I just needed the add in card(s), or the entire server for that matter.
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@travisdh1 Thanks for the advice.
