Anyone else running diskless?

IsaacKuo · Post by **IsaacKuo** » Sat Jul 29, 2006 8:08 pm

Yesterday, I figured out how to convert a workstation with a Debian install into a diskless workstation. The way I did it, I got to start off with a fully configured normal local installation, and convert it into a diskless workstation. This was great, because in no time I converted three workstations to diskless.

Here's a how-to I wrote up based on my experience: How I did it: diskless netboot with Debian Etch

I really like the fact that I can start off with a normal local installation and just convert it into a diskless workstation (and back, if I just reverse some steps). In particular, this meant that I could convert my HTPC with all of its tweaks and customizations with minimal effort.

hapveg · Post by **hapveg** » Sat Aug 05, 2006 5:15 pm

I briefly tried running semi-diskless.

It's a gaming rig (windows), but also bootable from a Damn Small Linux usb key, with hdd's set to powerdown after a few minutes inactivity.

Using DSL for websurfing was incredibly silent (no hdd's, semi-fanless PSU stayed fanless, CPU fan stayed at minimum speed).

Worked really well, can't really think why I stopped using it, might try it again when I get a fanless Core2Duo in a few days.

cAPSLOCK · Post by **cAPSLOCK** » Sun Aug 06, 2006 4:53 am

While this method solves the noise problem, it actually makes your total power consumption worse, since you now need two machines. A better solution for a computer that has plenty of ram is just to find a way of spinning your harddrive down for everything but loading/saving documents. Laptop-mode does something like this, but it turns the disk on briefly every few minutes or so, and makes it worse than if it was on all the time, maybe with some ramdisks and playing with the laptop-mode config this could be fixed... I'll definately give it a try when I get a pc with a decent amount of ram

IsaacKuo · Post by **IsaacKuo** » Sun Aug 06, 2006 5:08 am

It lowers total power consumption if you have a file server anyway. This "file server" could even be a low power network storage device like the NSLU2 (a.k.a. "slug") running Linux. Since you can run Debian on a slug, my how-to should work with it.

Aris · Post by **Aris** » Wed Aug 16, 2006 10:31 am

So wait, your "loading" windows and applications into RAM?

how much ram space are we talking about?

OR

Is this basically a remote hard drive using a network interface?

IsaacKuo · Post by **IsaacKuo** » Wed Aug 16, 2006 10:44 am

It's essentially using a remote hard drive via wired ethernet, but not with Windows. I'm using Debian GNU/Linux, in particular.

Someone here on SPCR has gotten loading Windows 98 from a Flash drive into RAM to work. I haven't messed with that sort of thing myself.

Aris · Post by **Aris** » Wed Aug 16, 2006 11:54 am

so then your really not "diskless" then are you?

I wonder how well this would work with one of those wireless NAS enclosures. Put a few large/fast hard drives in a closet someplace, and access them with remote "terminals".

Its sort of a step backwards isnt it? Didnt they do this sort of thing with mainfraims and dummy terminals back in the 70's and 80's?

all this extra work to get rid of hard drive noise, it would be cheeper to just get notebook drives instead.

IsaacKuo · Post by **IsaacKuo** » Wed Aug 16, 2006 12:50 pm

It's not my fault, it's the standard definition of "diskless workstation".

It's not the same thing as the old days of dumb terminals--although one option for a diskless workstation is indeed to use it as a thin client dumb terminal. The way I'm doing it is that the workstation is a "thick client". It runs all programs locally. The server is just used to access files.

Anyway, it is most definitely CHEAPER than using notebook drives. I was using 2.5" drives before. I also already had a file server before. Switching over to diskless let me remove all of the notebook drives from my Linux workstations. That was great! I shifted them over to being used in a few Windows workstations. The resulting silence was wonderful.

If I had discovered this technique a couple years ago, I probably would never have even bothered with 2.5" drives, and saved myself a bundle of money.

Longwalker · Post by **Longwalker** » Tue Aug 29, 2006 11:38 am

Disk performance will be really bad without gigabit ethernet, though. The 8-10Mbytes/sec practical limit of fast ethernet is a huge step backwards from what even laptop drives can do. Naturally, the costs of installing gig-E will offset the cost benefits of going diskless.

Tibors · Post by **Tibors** » Tue Aug 29, 2006 12:21 pm

Longwalker wrote:Disk performance will be really bad without gigabit ethernet, though.

Well, that depends on your definition of really bad. I don't think anybody is going to do this for a gaming machine or hoping to win any benchmarks.

On the other hand, for an average computer used for surfing, mailing and serious work like programming and wordprocessing it will be completely adequate. Ask the millions of office drones working with their data on fileservers.

Azazel · Post by **Azazel** » Tue Aug 29, 2006 1:04 pm

Tibors wrote:
Longwalker wrote:Disk performance will be really bad without gigabit ethernet, though.
Well, that depends on your definition of really bad. I don't think anybody is going to do this for a gaming machine or hoping to win any benchmarks.

On the other hand, for an average computer used for surfing, mailing and serious work like programming and wordprocessing it will be completely adequate. Ask the millions of office drones working with their data on fileservers.

You'll find there's a pretty big difference between working with a word file stored on a fileserver (where the only time you communicate with the server is when you load or save it) and having your swap space on a seperate machine, as well as all your applications and files. Sure, in a perfect world you'll have enough RAM to not worry about swapping in linux, but try that with a relatively heavyweight application. I suggest you take programming off the list of lightweight tasks, if you don't believe me, try running Websphere Integration Developer. Diskless stations are a great idea and I'd love one, but the tradeoffs are simply too big for me.

You can argue all day about how most people barely stress their systems and you could survive with less speed 90% of the time, but you'll hate that final 10% enough to make this not worthwhile. I'd rather not quadruple load times on my applications and make my swapping take an order of magnitude longer if I don't have to.

Tibors · Post by **Tibors** » Wed Aug 30, 2006 11:09 am

Azazel wrote:I suggest you take programming off the list of lightweight tasks, if you don't believe me, try running Websphere Integration Developer.

I don't know that particular development environment, but there are enough development environments that don't have a bloated IDE over a bloated framework. Because that is the only thing that makes programming a heavy weight task and why I seem to need a faster computer to run MS Visual Studio at work. Coding in C on Linux at home hardly gets my computers memory half full. And if I look at the requirements for Ruby on Rails, which I'm going to try next, if I find the time, then it doesn't look that "hardware eating" either.

But then again I'm using Zenwalk Linux which is fast and light on the resource requirements, without missing any important features.

Azazel · Post by **Azazel** » Wed Aug 30, 2006 3:05 pm

Tibors wrote:
Azazel wrote:I suggest you take programming off the list of lightweight tasks, if you don't believe me, try running Websphere Integration Developer.
I don't know that particular development environment, but there are enough development environments that don't have a bloated IDE over a bloated framework. Because that is the only thing that makes programming a heavy weight task and why I seem to need a faster computer to run MS Visual Studio at work. Coding in C on Linux at home hardly gets my computers memory half full. And if I look at the requirements for Ruby on Rails, which I'm going to try next, if I find the time, then it doesn't look that "hardware eating" either.

But then again I'm using Zenwalk Linux which is fast and light on the resource requirements, without missing any important features.

Admittedly, there is a difference between programming for a hobby and programming for fun, but I'm getting pretty sick of hearing that all I need to develop is vim or emacs. You can say what you like about how 'bloated' VS, RAD or WID are, but it just so happens that those features happen to be bloody helpful for real development.

What this diskless setup IS perfect for is HTPCs, IMO. Chances are you'd be down to a single source of noise if done right, or none even if you get a passive cooling case. Plus you could use a smaller enclosure...

Longwalker · Post by **Longwalker** » Wed Aug 30, 2006 9:38 pm

Tibors wrote:On the other hand, for an average computer used for surfing, mailing and serious work like programming and wordprocessing it will be completely adequate. Ask the millions of office drones working with their data on fileservers.

There's a big difference between using remote data and loading applications over a network. A typical wordprocessing file is under 100KB. That's trivial to pull over a network. In contrast, to edit the typical wordproccessing file on Linux, a diskless workstation will have to pull down 100MB+ worth of Openoffice. That's going to take at least 13 seconds but in practice, probably closer to a minute. Loading Openoffice over fast ethernet is about as quick as loading Portable Openoffice off a USB keydrive--that is to say, not very quick at all.

Further, the limitations of fast Ethernet can be problematic for multimedia data. For instance, sweeping a large collection of MP3s for track length or ID3 tags would take not minutes but rather hours. This could be an issue for some HTPC applications.

It's better to use a terminal server approach rather than a diskless workstation approach when using fast Ethernet. It's just not fast enough for diskless to be all that useful for modern applications. Diskless at usable speeds requires gig-E.

mb2 · Post by **mb2** » Fri Sep 01, 2006 10:01 am

nice. i'd give it a try if i had a wired LAN. perhaps for a print server but then the old mobos u'd use for that don't have PXE. i'm right in thinking its impossible to get it working with wireless?

So how long does it take to boot up via network, compared to on HDD?

When (fast) CF cards (and the adaptors) are quite cheap though, u may aswell atleast load the OS on a CF card, or most used programs even?
Then u can use windows too if u want.

i'll be resurecting w98 in ram soon too

edit: 1 more post and 500

IsaacKuo · Post by **IsaacKuo** » Sat Sep 02, 2006 4:53 pm

Hi there...back from vacation...

I don't use swap over the network. I'm not sure if that's even possible. My workstations have either 256megs or 512megs of RAM...they have no swap at all. I don't do anything particularly file access intensive on the diskless workstations--I use the file server itself as a "power" workstation instead.

Azazel · Post by **Azazel** » Sun Sep 03, 2006 1:52 pm

IsaacKuo wrote:Hi there...back from vacation...

I don't use swap over the network. I'm not sure if that's even possible. My workstations have either 256megs or 512megs of RAM...they have no swap at all. I don't do anything particularly file access intensive on the diskless workstations--I use the file server itself as a "power" workstation instead.

What happens if you use more than your RAM allotment? A WebSphere instance with a test server will blow 2 gigs away, will it simply not open or what? I've never run linux without a swap partition.

IsaacKuo · Post by **IsaacKuo** » Tue Sep 05, 2006 1:32 pm

I don't actually know for sure. Things get really unpleasantly sluggish when you start to run out of RAM. I think what happens is that loaded executable code gets "swapped out" even though there's no swap--they already exist on the OS file system, after all. Switching between tasks becomes an unusable thrash-o-rama.

If you really do run out of memory, then I think whatever process was unlucky enough to have a failed "malloc" first will unceremoniously exit (unless it was run from a shell console, in which case it could output an "out of memory" error). This will free up that process's resources.

Of course, if there's one particular memory hog that is gobbling up all the RAM, then that process will most likely fail first or second.

mb2 · Post by **mb2** » Thu Sep 07, 2006 7:50 pm

iirc, running puppy (linux) from CD with 128mb ram.. basically (what i think was) running out of memory (offenders being mozilla and their disk mount util) simply lead to the system grinding to a halt. it did recover if u closed the offending app, but its far, far quicker to just restart (ie, getting the mouse to move took several minutes). whereas in windows (atleast 9x) it just leads to a box, stopping u load anything that would push it over the top..

IsaacKuo · Post by **IsaacKuo** » Fri Sep 08, 2006 10:33 am

With something like a Puppy Linux LiveCD, the effect of running low on memory is going to be VERY sluggish. The "swapped out" executable code is stored on CD in a compressed form, so the computer needs to constantly reload the code from CD, then decompress it, and then run it.

I don't have experience with Puppy, but my experiences with Knoppix and Mepis on low RAM are like that.

Anyone else running diskless?

Do you have a diskless computer?

Anyone else running diskless?