Company computer utilization?

[Jakob Oestergaard]

On Tue, Jul 16, 2002 at 10:03:05PM -0700, Joffre Heredia wrote:
> 
>  I would set the default boot partition to linux and then install a
> scheduler for windows that reboots the computer at a late hour (lets say 21.00).
> This will automatically start linux at night.
> 
> There are freeware and shareware schedulers for windows that you can use.
> Just take a look at google.
> 
>  About booting windows early at morning, lets say 07.00, you just have to
> set a crontab entry in /etc/crontab. To start windows you have two
> options: 1. manually: You can make the computer going off with a simple
> shutdown and then tell the users to type 'windows' at the boot prompt when
> they arrive at work and power on their computers. 2. automatically: Make a
> script to execute a "lilo -R windows" before shutting the computer down
> (man lilo for help). This will load windows ONLY next time.
> 

If you boot Linux via. PXELinux (with root-NFS if you wish), then you
could actually just configure your boot server so that the PXELinux
config. files change.

If a PXE boot agent contacts the server around 21:00-05:00 the
configuration will say "get a linux kernel from tftp and boot!" while if
this happens at 05:00-21:00 it will say "directly boot from disk 0
immediately"

No partition black magic needed.

If the desktops all support PXE, this might really be a neat way of
getting them to run Linux in the night, without ever touching the
windows hard-disks in the machines.

-- 
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