Solution for school lab

[Sergio de Almeida Lenzi]

> Consider installing VMWare ESXi and instances of whatever operating system 
> you like. We have template operating systems we copy to new/replacement 
> instances. You can export your disks to the instances but with all things 
> you gain some, you loose some.

with the small machine (phenon 4, 8Gb), and vmware, the sistems is
slow... and the MB does
not accept more than 8GB.  Besides I would need a version of each
operating system for VMWARE..
and I do not know if vmware can be used for free. If even in a school
you can, in other places
you cannot, so I would cope with several platforms... Here I run a
business based on FreeBSD,
and the less different solutions the better...

> 
> As someone else mentioned, consider netboot. The booted instance can do 
> whatever they want to your hardware but disks are likely to have to be 
> re-initialized each time, which is fine if you are using disks for swap 
> and other temporary things.

I use PXE because it is in the firmware of the MB... (almost always
have)... some very old
computers, does not boot anything but: floppy, cd, or HD... I choose
CD..  one CD,
boot all machines...  Netboot is great too... 

> 
> With regard to VirtualBox, someone needs to fix it (probably just update 
> the port). The network driver (IIRC) eats memory.

Strange  I have been using it in a day basis, and never had problems
with that... the 
machine sometimes suffer power failure (3 months, or 1 month period)..

I use FreeBSD 8.2 in zfs...  with zmirror, and daylly snapshots...  so I
can go back anything
till 5 days ago...

Anyway, thanks for the information

[]
Sergio