Diskless Remote Boot in Linux in short DRBL is an open source environment to to manage GNU/Linux operating system deployment. Imagine the time required to install GNU/Linux on 40, 30, or even 10 client machines individually. DRBL will allow you to configure all of your client computers by installing just one server machine.
DRBL uses PXE/etherboot, NFS, and NIS to provide services to client machines, so you do not have install GNU/Linux on the harddrive of the clients. Once the server is ready to be a DRBL server, then the client machines can boot via PXE/etherboot (diskless).
"DRBL" does NOT touch the harddrive of the clients, so other Operating Systems (for example, M$ Windows) installed on your client machines will not be affected.
This may be important in a phased deployment of GNU/Linux, where users still want to have the option of booting to Windows and running Office. DRBL allows you to be flexible in your deployment of GNU/Linux.
Harddrives are optional for a DRBL client. The harddrive is just another moving part to fail or create more noise. If a harddrive is present, then the client can be configured to use it as swap space, while GNU/Linux is installed and configured on the centralized boot server.
Using the DRBL centralized boot environment, you can save a lot of time by configuring the client settings at the boot server. This gives the system administrator more control over what software configurations are running on each client.
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Here are some key features of "DRBL":
· Coexist with other Operating Systems
· Install one server, you have all clients ready
· Save hardware budget and maintenance fee
What's New in This Release: [ read full changelog ]
· Mandriva 2009.1, Ubuntu 5.0.1 and Ubuntu 9.04 are supported in this release.
· Language files were upudated. Thanks to Alex Ibanez Lopez ,Jean-Francois Nifenecker, Gianfranco Gentili, Annie Wei, Akira YOSHIYAMA, and Zhiqiang Zhang.
· New upstream syslinux 3.80.
· New program isohybrid was included.
· Option "-q2" (partclone > partimage > dd) is the default option.
· Package lzma was listed in the list in drbl.conf, and option -z4 can be selected in dcs now.
· Bug fixed: For Debian lenny, Ubuntu 8.10 or later, we should not allow network to be down when halting. Otherwise wake-on-LAN won't work.
· Some improvements about Clonezilla were added.
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