Booting of Diskless Workstation

Abstract

This paper focuses on proposing a system for centralization of the IT infrastructure by building upon the concept of Diskless Booting. The client stations are configured to boot over an existing network using the Network Boot. The Client Station lacks an actual Hard Drive, which is responsible for storing the boot files and other necessary files. It consists of other hardware excluding the Hard Drive such as, RAM, Processor, etc. The network consists of DHCP (Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol) server which assigns IP addresses to several client stations connected. The NIS (Network Information Service) server stores the login credentials of all the users, enabling the users to login from any client station without any restrictions. The NFS (Network File System) server makes the files available for the user, even on the absence of local secondary storage. Security is ensured by SHA (Security Hash Algorithm), which encrypts the sensitive data by creating the hash values. Individual ports and services can be kept secured by using the Firewall service. The open source Cockpit Tool provides a GUI with which the administrator can conveniently carry out several admin-oriented tasks, such as memory management, user management.