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ATA Over Ethernet
Anyone aware of a PCI ATA to Ethernet bridge that can be used to boot diskless systems?
I know Coraid produces a storage SAN based on linux for storage purposes. I'm more or less interested in diskless scenarios., so that the storage system can export the AoE volumes similar to an NFS boot.
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Something else to consider would be to boot using PXE over the network, and then mount the filesystems over NFS or Samba.
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One thing to consider is that AoE is not routable. So if there's a router involved anywhere in between, you'll have to use iSCSI instead.
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PXE Boot is just fine
You can do PXE Boot and mount an AOE device just like any other type of diskless system. I've currently got it up and running with a standard initrd ramdisk that starts up a network interface, locates the AOE "partition" and mounts it just fine as root. No issues whatsoever. You can also use VLAN's very easily so each system cannot see any AOE partitions other then those for the system in question