Diskless Booting For the Modern Age

An anonymous reader writes "Ever wonder what happened to PXE? Intel's popular standard for diskless booting hasn't been updated since 1999, and has missed out on such revolutions as wireless Ethernet, cloud computing, and iSCSI. An open source project called Etherboot has been trying to drag PXE into the 21st century. One of their programmers explains how to set up diskless booting for your cloud, using copy-on-write to save space."

Re:How is it slow?

[improfane]

Is it possible to use multicast? The multicast could run continuously or on demand. Can you route multicast?

It would be pretty impressive if one could attach 3 nodes to the network and they all boot up.

It would be a Borg network. Everything you add to it would be immediately taken over!

NODE (DHCP): Hi I'm a Dell workstat-
BORG NODE #1 (x.x.3.43): We are borg
NODE: ACK
BORG NODE #2 (x.x.3.44): We wil add your likeness to our own
NODE: RST RST RST
BORG NODE #3 (x.x.3.40): Resistance is futile
NODE: Downloading borg....
BORG NODE #2: We will add your likeness to our own (as soon as you have downloaded. ...
BORG NODE #4 (x.x.3.45): We are borg.

Cloud?

[plasticsquirrel]

Good grief, everything is a "cloud" now. Have some servers on a rack? Those aren't servers, that's a cloud! It's like some retards took a Cisco networking diagram, and went crazy when they realized that everything could be simplified into one of the "clouds".

Warning / Rant: The last 5 years of computing have been pretty lame. Concurrency and solutions to it using functional high-level languages are the future. That's where we should have been five years ago when it was so obvious that chips with large numbers of cores were the future. These cloud solutions are just a stupid name for the same old monolithic crap. It doesn't scale and isn't modular in a Unixy way. Modern applications just suck because they're so inflexible. Why can I do so many things from a little text terminal, but I can't easily script the behavior of my web browser without special add-ons? Why aren't modern applications flexible like this, with simple interfaces for communicating with other programs? Where is the equivalent of a shell pipe, in modern applications? It's like somebody threw away all the lessons of the past, and said "But this is the new way, we don't need the old way, because this is new." Fuck that, computing should be better than this. It should be better than these stupid clouds and old piece-of-shit reinvent-the-wheel C and C++ programs with buffer overflows and other ancient problems. Or the HTML / Javascript / whatever jerry-rigged "web applications" that run on some opaque "cloud" that a random company has. Why is it that languages like Smalltalk and Lisp have been around for so long, and nobody learns from them or uses them? It's like the chips keep getting faster and faster, and people keep getting dumber and dumber.

And we less computer-oriented nerds

[Wilson_6500]

naturally laugh at the mere suggestion of dickless booting.