[Gllug] Wanted - small (20, 30, 40gb) ide disks for kids' computers

[damion.yates at gmail.com]

On Thu, 19 Nov 2009, Walter Stanish wrote:

> > At the BBC the Unix team built everything from their desks, via
> > serial consoles and netbooting, but occasionally we'd need to
> > venture down to the datacentre, where we'd see the Windows engineers
> > in coats installing by cdrom.
> 
> A lovely tale!

I thought the important part was that Windows needed Linux to get
installed!

> I agree that in my experience net booting, for all the up front
> configuration that may be required, is such a brilliant way to deploy
> systems.

It had been this way for MANY years, probably as soon as they got SPARC
Sun hardware capable of it (late 80s?).

We then acquired the Windows team for an existing Windows media
streaming solution, and they managed to do a couple of other bbc sites
(jobs.bbc.co.uk is ASP, and /dna forums were a spinoff from hitchhikers
h2g2).  We considered their manual installations as completely retarded,
but they stuck with it.  It is actually possible to build Windows
servers remotely too.  You can even do it in bulk using MS technology.
Or open source solutions closer modelled on the Unix ways, I think using
dosemu for part of it!  Of course anyone that technically minded to go
down that route, probably wouldn't have chosen MS as a solution in the
1st place, which is why you rarely see this deployed.

There is a lot of depressing history around this merge which I'll omit
for now.
 
> More people should try this.
 
It's been amazingly trivial to install via remote serial console on Unix
for years.  And as for netbooting, Knoppix has has this as a built-in
feature for many years for anyone wanting to see it in action.  A single
knoppix CD could permit a small room of PXE capable (this has been
common for longer than people realise) machines to all run Knoppix
within minutes.

Damion
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