Gentoo diskless clients
31 Aug 2004 
in the late afternoon 
Matt Winckler
Last week I discovered that a bunch of the network cards that came in the pile of useless technology I recently acquired have PXE preinstalled! This makes them prime candidates for thin clients–indeed, they probably served as thin clients in their previous lives. So I promptly set about getting one of them up and running as a diskless Gentoo workstation.
This is one of those things that I know just enough about to be dangerous. Gentoo.org has some pretty good guides, but parts of them are incomplete and/or not clear on just what you are supposed to be doing (and why). Combining them all, plus some help from the Linux Terminal Server Project (LTSP), got me off to a start. One of Gentoo’s guides is the LTSP guide, which is supposed to address just getting LTSP up and running. That was pretty good, but came up short regarding PXE. To fill in those gaps, I referred to the Diskless Nodes with Gentoo guide, which mentioned the necessity of pxelinux.0 and some of the differences between it and Etherboot.
After hammering around for hours, I now have a workstation that will load the kernel from the server, then promptly display a screen full of multicolored and flashing ASCII characters. I have absolutely no clue what this could possibly mean, except maybe that I need to compile a different kernel for the workstation to boot off of. Eventually when (if) I get it all working, I’ll have to post my own howto. If, that is, I ever come to completely understand what it is I did to get to where I am…