[plug] remote terminal

[Craig Ringer]

> ow can i set up an old box as a remote terminal. i.e. not having a OS 
> installed and booting from the network/grabbing a tty from the server. 
> It has a 4x cdrom and a ISA netcard. I wish to have it as a terminal 
> for my linux box. 

Easy except for the "grabbing a tty from the server" bit. Please explain 
further - what do you mean by grabbing a tty from the server?

If you meant displaying a server login screen on the client... hmm. I 
know how to do it using X (and have been having much, much fun with that 
lately) but the best I can think of for the console is instead of 
running a getty from inittab you run a shell script that waits for the 
user to enter a username then runs ssh to connect to the server and 
demand a password for login. Perhaps there's some kind of getty already 
capable of that sort of thing, but it isn't something I've needed to 
mess with.

Remote boot is fairly easy - you probably want to use etherboot and a 
floppy disk, plus an OS image on the server shared over NFS. I can send 
you quick instructions ( no batteries included, assembly definitely 
required ) for a debian-based custom one or you could try ltsp or 
something like that. Up to you. Alternately you could prep a custom 
bootable ISO if your machine's BIOS is up to it.