Research Of The GPXE Based Intelligent Diskless System Management Technology

The network boot technology is increasingly being used with its development. In these sites, such as internet cafes, school, large hotel, a lot of diskless computers are needed, gPXE(Open-source Preboot Execution Environment) has been a growing popular number of the network boot systems as an open source.This thesis studies the boot principle of PXE(Preboot Execution Environment), gPXE and the construction principle of Etherboot used as a second stage loader. By the study of the boot principle of gPXE, this thesis add the boot process of IBP(Intelligent Boot Process) after the DHCP process in gPXE. The customization process based on gPXE can improve the success rate of the system start.On the basis of the IBP system, this thesis achieves a management system for the images'dump and update and multiple images corresponding to multiple clients. And it provides console commands interface to manage the image easily for users. There are two steps to achieve multiple images corresponding to multiple clients. First of all, IBP will create a device mapper which can be distributed on the network on the basis of the original volume. And it will create an iSCSI disk for each client. Clients start the operating system by the device mapper, and write the data back to the iSCSI disks. In this way, this thesis achieve the function of one image corresponding to multiple clients. Secondly, this thesis studies snapshot feature of the LVM2, and achieves the read/write function of images. And it achieves images' update through the dump function of images. This thesis achieves multiple images corresponding to multiple clients through the above two steps. And it describes the production process of images and the management of images using the commands.