Diskless FreeBSD workstations work beautifully for many users. With recent changes in FreeBSD 5.x, the old
methods of building a netbooting lab have changed. Read more at OnLamp.com.
Building a BSD Netboot Server
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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I have a diskless jukebox server. It boots using PXEBOOT and runs Music Player Daemon. I have the box sitting in a closet in my living room area and it’s completely silent.
My only problem is that musicpd doesn’t like the NFS swapfile. If the server is out of memory, it has troubles starting a new song unless I restart musicpd. Otherwise it works extremely well! I even managed to run XFCE4 on this box.
Well, I could, but that’s not an elegant solution. I would much rather figure out why it won’t swap instead. I may try upgrading musicpd to see if that helps. The mpd processes on the machine are pegged when I have my server configured for a network boot.
Also, it would sort of suck if the mpd process gets restarted while in the middle of a playlist.