Can I boot a diskless machine over iSCSI?
It is possible to boot a diskless computer with the help of iSCSI, but it is a bit more complicated then booting with regular parallel SCSI or Fibre Channel. The reason it is more complicated is because the computer which boots needs to have a TCP/IP stack and iSCSI driver configured and working before it can access iSCSI-based storage. This creates a chicken-and-egg problem, because most iSCSI client solutions rely on a loaded OS to function. This problem can be overcome with a hardware iSCSI HBA, but some software-only solutions are also available: For Linux OS, there is a method of mixed-protocol booting, which uses iSCSI for all disk access once the machine is booted. There is a protocol for booting over iSCSI being developed with the help of IETF: see the “Bootstrapping Clients using the iSCSI Protocol” document on their web site. Unfortunately, we are not aware of any implementations of this protocol yet. Please, let us know if you know of a such implementation. IBM has a proprie
