Thursday, December 11, 2008

UNetbootin

I need to setup a couple of DNS servers. Because they are DNS servers, performance isn't critical, so I would like to employ some older machines (does that count as green?)

These servers will be headless and since one of the easiest pieces to fail (because it's one of the few components that have mechanical parts) is the hard drive, I would like to eliminate it altogether.

I've booted diskless clients before, and it wasn't as easy as I'd like it to be. Also, that just moves the onus of the hard disk failure to another machine, it does not eliminate it.

The solution I've come up with is to boot from a USB flash drive. The biggest issue with this is persistence of my settings, but they've pretty much taken care of that recently.

I'm going to use UNetbootin to accomplish the installation of the OS to the USB drive.

I also think I'm going to use DSL for the OS, as it seems to be recommended by this post.

1 comment:

Chris Lydick said...

Yeah dude, DSL is the way to go after reading that posted link. I was kinda shocked to see that it needed 24M of ram.. I mean, I think my windows-based phone uses at least that, and it's sooooo slow. Nice one!