7 ms·

Back in the the day it was possible to boot Sun Solaris over HTTP. This was called wanboot. This article reminded me of that. This was basically an option of t

Back in the the day it was possible to boot Sun Solaris over HTTP. This was called wanboot. This article reminded me of that. This was basically an option of the OpenBoot PROM firmware of the SPARC machines. It looked like this (ok is the forth prompt of the firmware): ok setenv network-boot-arguments dhcp,hostname=myclient,file=https://192.168.1.1/cgi-bin/wanboot-cgi ok boot net This doesn't only load the initramfs over the (inter)network but also the kernel. https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E26505_01/html/E28037/wanboottasks2-105.html#scrolltoc https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E26505_01/html/E28037/wanboottask... https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19253-01/821-0439/wanboottasks2-61/index.html https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19253-01/821-0439/wanboottasks2-...

unixhero 2y ago
"The network is the computer." It was a shortlived thing.
- msh 2y ago
  I guess Chromebook’s is the resurrection of the idea
  - Teckla 2y ago
    Thanks to Crostini, Chromebooks are also excellent local computing devices.
  - bluGill 2y ago
    Not really. Chromebooks don't use the LAN. They can run code locally, or on the server in a different timezone. However with Sun if you needed more CPU you could log into all the machines on your local network - all machines shared the same filesystem(NFS) and passwd (I forget this was), so using all the CPUs in the building was easy. It was unencrypted, but generally good enough until the Morris worm. Of course moderns servers have far more CPU power than even the largest LANs back in 1986. Still those of use who remember when Sun was a big deal miss the power of the network.
    - toast0 2y ago
      > all machines shared the same filesystem(NFS) and passwd (I forget this was), so using all the CPUs in the building was easy. Sun did this through NIS, originally Yellow Pages/YP, but name changed for trademarks. When I worked at Yahoo, corp machines typically participated in an automounter config so your home would follow you around, it was super convenient (well, except when the NFS server, which might be your personal corp dev machine under your desk, went away, and there was no timeout for NFS operations... retry until the server comes back or heat death of the universe). They used a sync script to push passwords out, rather than NIS though --- a properly driven sync script works almost as fast, but has much better availability, as long as you don't hit an edge case (I recall someone having difficulty because they left the company and came back, and were still listed as a former employee in some database, so production access would be removed automatically)
- anon35 2y ago
  "Short-lived" depends on your perspective. Cloudflare owns the rights to that trademark now; because they believe their mission furthers that vision: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Network_is_the_Computer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Network_is_the_Computer (and John Cage, the Sun employee who coined the phrase, said he was fine with Cloudflare picking it up: https://spectrum.ieee.org/does-repurposing-of-sun-microsystems-slogan-honor-history https://spectrum.ieee.org/does-repurposing-of-sun-microsyste...)
- MisterTea 2y ago
  That's because Sun just bolted stuff on to Unix. Bell Labs actually achieved that goal in Plan 9 which is still very much alive.
mrgaro 2y ago
I remember the glorious AIX machines we had which could book from tape backups made with a simple "mksysbk" command. :)
- bastawhiz 2y ago
  How slow was that?
  - dspillett 2y ago
    If it is pulling a filesystem from tape into memory and booting from that, it could be pretty quick. Reading sequentially from tape, if you are already at the right location which is easy if that location is the start of the tape, isn't particularly slow at all – non-sequential access is where tape storage becomes very slow due to massive latency in the physical mechanisms.
prmoustache 2y ago
Grub can boot a kernel from http too.
Iwan-Zotow 2y ago
https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/228452/can-grub-load-a-kernel-from-http https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/228452/can-grub-loa...
jpalomaki 2y ago
Booting over HTTP would be interesting for device like Raspberry. Then you could run without memory card and have less things to break.
- lesuorac 2y ago
  https://www.google.com/search?q=raspberry%20pi%20pxe%20booting https://www.google.com/search?q=raspberry%20pi%20pxe%20booti... There was an article recent for somebody doing it on an Orange Pi [1]. IIUC, you can have one RasPi with an SD Card (I use USB drives but w/e) to be the PXE server and then the rest can all network boot. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40811725 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40811725
- AnimalMuppet 2y ago
  Welcome back, diskless workstations! We've missed you... oh, wait, no, we really haven't. This is technically neat, but... How often does the memory card break on a Raspberry? How often does the network break (either Raspberry hardware or upstream)? There are fewer things to break when you run from local hardware.
  - Semaphor 2y ago
    I'd say sd card failures are the most common rPI failures.
    - BobbyTables2 2y ago
      Only because people treat them like harddrives and stubbornly run desktop distos on them. Keep log files and other things frequently written in RAM and the sdcard will last forever. When was the last time an sdcard in a digital camera wore out?
  - ssl-3 2y ago
    Amusingly, most of the things I regularly use Raspberry Pi hardware for require a functional network as well as functional storage on that network. If I were to netboot these things, then I'd have fewer points of failure than I do now.
kotaKat 2y ago
Modern UEFI can do that too! https://ipxe.org/appnote/uefihttp https://ipxe.org/appnote/uefihttp
- Andrex 2y ago
  First thing I disable on a new PC.
  - mywittyname 2y ago
    I was going to say, booting from a random website image sounds like a terrible idea.
    - michaelmior 2y ago
      It's possible to require that any images used be signed using a specific key that is configured in the hardware ahead of time. Even if you don't do that, the same setup can be helpful for provisioning a bunch of machines without accessing any external network. You can configure a small box to act just as a DHCP server and to serve a machine image for network boot. Then you can have all the machines on this subnet automatically load that image as it is updated without the need for any further configuration on each device. I've seen organizations do something similar to this for trade shows when they want a bunch of machines that visitors can interact with and don't want to have to keep them updated individually. Just update the image once and reboot each machine.
      - xur17 2y ago
        Ideally it would be possible to just specify an image url and a hash. Or, even better, a magnet link.
        yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago
        I dunno, I actually think a public key is better than a hash, because it lets you sign updated images without having to update things on the client. Obviously it should be user-controlled, but this feels like a legitimate use.
ktm5j 2y ago
I remember doing this to install Solaris while resurrecting an old sparcstation. Fun times!
lanstin 2y ago
I didn't realize that. I booted over BootP many times but this is even cooler.

unixhero 2y ago

"The network is the computer." It was a shortlived thing.

msh 2y ago
I guess Chromebook’s is the resurrection of the idea
- Teckla 2y ago
  Thanks to Crostini, Chromebooks are also excellent local computing devices.
- bluGill 2y ago
  Not really. Chromebooks don't use the LAN. They can run code locally, or on the server in a different timezone. However with Sun if you needed more CPU you could log into all the machines on your local network - all machines shared the same filesystem(NFS) and passwd (I forget this was), so using all the CPUs in the building was easy. It was unencrypted, but generally good enough until the Morris worm. Of course moderns servers have far more CPU power than even the largest LANs back in 1986. Still those of use who remember when Sun was a big deal miss the power of the network.
  - toast0 2y ago
    > all machines shared the same filesystem(NFS) and passwd (I forget this was), so using all the CPUs in the building was easy. Sun did this through NIS, originally Yellow Pages/YP, but name changed for trademarks. When I worked at Yahoo, corp machines typically participated in an automounter config so your home would follow you around, it was super convenient (well, except when the NFS server, which might be your personal corp dev machine under your desk, went away, and there was no timeout for NFS operations... retry until the server comes back or heat death of the universe). They used a sync script to push passwords out, rather than NIS though --- a properly driven sync script works almost as fast, but has much better availability, as long as you don't hit an edge case (I recall someone having difficulty because they left the company and came back, and were still listed as a former employee in some database, so production access would be removed automatically)
anon35 2y ago
"Short-lived" depends on your perspective. Cloudflare owns the rights to that trademark now; because they believe their mission furthers that vision: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Network_is_the_Computer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Network_is_the_Computer (and John Cage, the Sun employee who coined the phrase, said he was fine with Cloudflare picking it up: https://spectrum.ieee.org/does-repurposing-of-sun-microsystems-slogan-honor-history https://spectrum.ieee.org/does-repurposing-of-sun-microsyste...)
MisterTea 2y ago
That's because Sun just bolted stuff on to Unix. Bell Labs actually achieved that goal in Plan 9 which is still very much alive.

mrgaro 2y ago

I remember the glorious AIX machines we had which could book from tape backups made with a simple "mksysbk" command. :)

bastawhiz 2y ago
How slow was that?
- dspillett 2y ago
  If it is pulling a filesystem from tape into memory and booting from that, it could be pretty quick. Reading sequentially from tape, if you are already at the right location which is easy if that location is the start of the tape, isn't particularly slow at all – non-sequential access is where tape storage becomes very slow due to massive latency in the physical mechanisms.

prmoustache 2y ago

Grub can boot a kernel from http too.

Iwan-Zotow 2y ago

https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/228452/can-grub-load-a-kernel-from-http https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/228452/can-grub-loa...

jpalomaki 2y ago

Booting over HTTP would be interesting for device like Raspberry. Then you could run without memory card and have less things to break.

lesuorac 2y ago
https://www.google.com/search?q=raspberry%20pi%20pxe%20booting https://www.google.com/search?q=raspberry%20pi%20pxe%20booti... There was an article recent for somebody doing it on an Orange Pi [1]. IIUC, you can have one RasPi with an SD Card (I use USB drives but w/e) to be the PXE server and then the rest can all network boot. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40811725 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40811725
AnimalMuppet 2y ago
Welcome back, diskless workstations! We've missed you... oh, wait, no, we really haven't. This is technically neat, but... How often does the memory card break on a Raspberry? How often does the network break (either Raspberry hardware or upstream)? There are fewer things to break when you run from local hardware.
- Semaphor 2y ago
  I'd say sd card failures are the most common rPI failures.
  - BobbyTables2 2y ago
    Only because people treat them like harddrives and stubbornly run desktop distos on them. Keep log files and other things frequently written in RAM and the sdcard will last forever. When was the last time an sdcard in a digital camera wore out?
- ssl-3 2y ago
  Amusingly, most of the things I regularly use Raspberry Pi hardware for require a functional network as well as functional storage on that network. If I were to netboot these things, then I'd have fewer points of failure than I do now.

kotaKat 2y ago

Modern UEFI can do that too! https://ipxe.org/appnote/uefihttp https://ipxe.org/appnote/uefihttp

Andrex 2y ago
First thing I disable on a new PC.
- mywittyname 2y ago
  I was going to say, booting from a random website image sounds like a terrible idea.
  - michaelmior 2y ago
    It's possible to require that any images used be signed using a specific key that is configured in the hardware ahead of time. Even if you don't do that, the same setup can be helpful for provisioning a bunch of machines without accessing any external network. You can configure a small box to act just as a DHCP server and to serve a machine image for network boot. Then you can have all the machines on this subnet automatically load that image as it is updated without the need for any further configuration on each device. I've seen organizations do something similar to this for trade shows when they want a bunch of machines that visitors can interact with and don't want to have to keep them updated individually. Just update the image once and reboot each machine.
    - xur17 2y ago
      Ideally it would be possible to just specify an image url and a hash. Or, even better, a magnet link.
      - yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago
        I dunno, I actually think a public key is better than a hash, because it lets you sign updated images without having to update things on the client. Obviously it should be user-controlled, but this feels like a legitimate use.

ktm5j 2y ago

I remember doing this to install Solaris while resurrecting an old sparcstation. Fun times!

lanstin 2y ago

I didn't realize that. I booted over BootP many times but this is even cooler.