I am the sole IT person for a small private school. The school has about 60 PCs. All PCs are on a wireless network; there's no Ethernet network in the building.
I would like to migrate the school to Linux. I'd like the setup to require minimal maintenance of the endpoints, to support central authentication and file sharing, and to take advantage of the endpoint's CPU as much as possible.
The optimal scenario I envision is to install a small Linux distribution on the hard drive of each endpoint. This distribution would join the wireless network and mount the root filesystem via NFS. Then booting would proceed as normal. This scenario has the following advantages:
- It would work with the wireless network. (Whereas PXE solutions won't.)
- I can update almost all aspects of the system by modifying the endpoints' root filesystem stored on the server.
- Unlike regular thin client solutions, here we're using the endpoint's CPU rather than doing screen updates over the wireless network.
My questions:
- Is there a better scenario for what I am trying to do?
- Is there a better filesystem than NFS for this purpose? I'd love to use a filesystem that supports caching to the local hard drive, and downloads over the network only updated files.
- Has this been done and documented by anyone else? All howtos I find are for wired networks and PXE boot.