On Wed, 26 Mar 2003, Henry Nebrensky wrote:
> On Wed, 26 Mar 2003, Ian Stokes-Rees wrote:
>
> > If anyone has any comments or ideas about these, I'd be interested to hear.
>
> I've been eyeing up the (closed overnight) undergrad computer labs...
>
> I was wondering if one could make lilo know about time of day - if
> rebooting after 7pm use Linux, else Windows. Then you could switch back
> and forth by cunningly scheduling reboots...
You could use grub to request a config file from a tftp server. That
config file could then be altered centrally to boot from either of the two
hard disks depending on the time. You could also use the network cards
pxe stack to do a similar thing as well which would leave NT's boot
loader in place. You could even have the linux option of pxelinux
use a root over NFS system in which case you would need zero alteration
to the existing boxes other than changing the boot order in the bios.
One think you have to be careful about is the pxe stack is often
terrible at the timing out if the tftp server is unavailable so
you end up with your departments machines unbootable if the tftp server
was unavailable in the morning.
Also there are the techniques used by Cambridge's pwf-linux service.
http://www-uxsup.csx.cam.ac.uk/pwf-linux/
This adds an extra option to the NT boot loader to fire up linux
box with root over nfs using the existing Novell file systems. The
design of the system was very much to have minimum impact on the
existing NT setup.
>
> Obviously this only works for PC's where you *know* when they're not being
> used (secretarial staff, labs etc.)
>
> Never really looked into it though...
>
> Henry
>
> --
> Dr. Henry Nebrensky [log in to unmask]
> http://www.brunel.ac.uk/~eesrjjn
> DM: "Can you see what sort of shark that is - is it a porbeagle?"
> Penfold: "Looks more like a well-fed Alsatian, chief."
>
--
Steve Traylen
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http://www.gridpp.ac.uk/
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