Clients

Client systems are intelligent data collection points such as user or point-of-service terminals, which are defined by client templates installed on the server system to which the client is connected. These templates are created by the toolkit on the build machine and transferred to the server as part of the installation procedure. There are two types of client, the disk based and the diskless.

Disk based clients are systems that have their own hard disk and can initialize (or boot) themselves from images stored on those disks. The images are generated by the SCO Embedded Configuration Toolkit and transferred to the client hard disk by a suitable means, such as LAN connection. This is described in ``Deployment''.

Diskless clients are systems with no local hard disk. All operations are performed within the RAM of the system. In order to initially load the memory with the operating system/application image, that image must be downloaded from a server or from internal ROM or EPROM. The image is generated by the SCO Embedded Configuration Toolkit and transferred to the server or ROM/EPROM. Whenever the diskless client is either switched on or reset, the BOOTP and TFTP protocols take care of downloading the image from the server.

Figure 2-2 Booting diskless clients

An added feature of the client server environment as implemented by the toolkit is remote client access from the server. Tools provided by the toolkit enable administrators on an administration server to manipulate certain aspects of client templates. In addition, the server administrator has tools to monitor and control processes on clients. These are described in ``Remote client management''.