Quote:
Originally Posted by Mr Angry
Adolescent Angry wants a PC in his room for gaming (for "gaming" see: Porn).
I've got the schnitz together - pc, cat5 crossover etc but here's were Zing comes in (hopefully).
Can I network his machine to boot off my OS or am I talking "bonkers"?
Cheers in advance.
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Mr A, its not really clear to me what you really want?, is it a simple and cheapest way to connect a 2 machine LAN network were both can browse the net?.
or is there a reason you dont want to put a harddrive and OS in AA's PC upstairs?.
for a simple network for two windows PC machines it works but you need to keep your machine on as the master to route the web to his machine or he looses the net.
"===" =straight through rj45 cable
"=x=" =cross-over/xover rj45 cable
VM-CM/xADSL-modem<===>your Master-Machine network card1.
your MM network-card2<=x=>upstairs AAmachines network card1.
as you can see, your machine has two network cards in it, then you run the 'network setup wizard' on your machine and it will/should chose the network card1 as the gateway to the net and the network card2 as the LAN connection, your end is done.
go upstairs and run the 'network setup wizard' on his machine and this time pick the this machine connects through another.
modem===master=x=AA is the cheapest way, but he cant get through to the net if your machines off OR you pull out the x-over cable from your second network card for some reason
.
your machine is acting as the router for his X-over rj45 connected machine.
but as already said , its better just to get a cheap 10/100Mbit router, although id say buy a gigabit router today if your starting new as many 10/100 routers dont or cant really cope with 20Mbit/24Mbit VM/xADSL.
you can do it wirelessly if you prefer to do away with wires, but again better to buy the newest 11n today for longer term use, its will OC work for the old kit , it just takes longer to copy files to and from your machines and their shared drives/dirs.
if your trying to keep the noise down on the upstairs machine by not installing a large drive or 3, then theres aways freeNAS and useing iSCSI with that, to get a remote drive seen on the other end/the windowsXP as a local installed drive but again thats yet another PC stuck somewere out of the way, and a little bit of setting up but not to bad.
and your still going to need some form of bootable storage to use that, it can be a small HD, a USB2 key or external HD enclosure, 2 and half inch drives are very quiet for this purpose and they come in 160Gig sizes now and these hds work great if your after quiet/silent machine, but slower access OC.
using iSCSI, it will be seen as just a normal drive, and you can format it as you please and install all your/his apps/games as usual, its just slower as your running over cheap 1 gigabit network cards, not a local PATA/SATA cable.
if you really want to network boot a driverless machine, there are linux liveCDs out there were you could run as a VMware or qemu.exe CD/HD image on your machine for remote booting any LAN connected PC thats set for that in its onboard network card bios, but thats way to messy for right now, as it takes some setting up and you are giving away a lot of your machines CPU time and ram to the VMware/QEmu emulation.