mika’s advent calendar – day 10: grml-terminalserver
I assume you already know grml, the Debian based Linux Live-CD for sysadmins and texttool users. Besides booting via CD and USB there’s one further method worth knowing: booting via network. That’s where grml-terminalserver is showing up.
Using grml-terminalserver you can boot grml via network. If your computer(s) is/are able to boot via PXE all you need to do is boot grml on one system, execute ‘grml-terminalserver’ and press ‘OK’ in some few dialogs. grml-terminalserver sets up the necessary dhcp-server, tftp-server (for distributing the kernel image, the initrd + all other files from tftpboot/) and a nfs-server for you. It’s really that simple. :) If you already have these services available within your IT infrastructure you can boot grml without grml-terminalserver via network following the instructions from the grml wiki.