I wanted to try this for years, but no one would let me

Booting all your computers off of one server sounds like a great idea, right? In theory, yes. In practice, though? Not so much. But that’s why we're here to show you how iSCSI works, its benefits and disadvantages, and why KIOXIA is so awesome for sending us so many blazing-fast drives.

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CHAPTERS
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0:00 Intro
1:23 How does this work?
3:17 Jake hates this server
5:09 Trust us, these drives make sense
6:03 The long term plan
6:35 This server is soooooo great
7:07 Time for software
10:05 The difference between iSCSI and SMB
11:00 Installing network cards
12:40 But where do we boot from?
14:30 Installing Windows
17:30 It’s ALIVEEEE
20:18 The disadvantages
21:48 Thanks KIOXIA!
22:25 Outro

[sush]

- dad, i want to play Minecraft
- sorry, kid, got to rebuild entire home network again

[lameashecc]

Battery dies in Linus's mouse: ...
Linus: Time to upgrade the server!

[argetlam]

Everyone out here giving Linus shit for overcooking his home setup; but legit this is about the only place where you can see these super bad idea's implimented with expensive hardware. These thought experiments are cool to watch. Also he's probably getting enough flack from his family about dropping their PC's again.

[dwirandypradhika]

Internet cafes in my country do this, they have one immutable windows install in a server so they don't have any drives in the 100+ client, and they only need to maintain a single windows install, it's very cool!

The billing software handles the network boot situation, the clients get the immutable boot image while the server acts as a normal computer, you install a game and the clients only need to restart to have it too.

[tikityler]

Hey as someone who was IT for a LAN center using a number of different software solutions over the years, CCBoot, GGRock, etc. The biggest pain by far was getting the correct drivers for the different computers, especially updates that were CPU specific. Getting them wrong would cause the slowness you were seeing. Once all the drivers were correct you could get performance quite comparable a regular computer with an SSD in them and we were running off 10gb server to switch and 1gb from switch to each client machine.

Our setup was complicated by the need to do updates for the different machines and unify it into one boot image. Having all of the machines run the same mobo and cpu made the process a lot easier and more reliable.
Once you have everything ironed out you can get perfectly acceptable performance out of a setup like this and ours was nothing compared to your hardware. There is a lot of fiddling around to get it to work properly, most of my job was keeping that system in line.

[africanrainfrog]

you need to make a sink into a heatsink

[Unchartedeats]

The Linus home setup seems to be an exercise in adding more and more points of failure, this at least is redundant..

[gavinchriss]

I want to say this is awesome to see. I work at a university with an esports room and this is how we boot to the computers. I'm not going to name names of the companies that are involved. Yada yada but this is a cool concept. I mostly love it. The performance hits aren't really noticeable on one gig, but load times are slower than nvme drive, but I love seeing this be more out there rather than being a niche solution. Thank you for the video

[forid]

I recall this is something that Internet cafes back in the day did. If you get the configuration right, it performs fairly well. Back in those days it was way faster than hard drives built into the individual systems.

[timeobserver]

All the ESX admins are cringing right now. No dedicated storage network. No jumbo frame compact end to end. Horriffic block size settings. No crc offloading assurance. No linux pxe server to handle client image selection. Sooo painful. Etc etc

[starrynayt]

Most LAN Cafes here in the Philippines use iSCSI since it's way easier to update a single PC image and single game drive than do it for each PC on the cafe.

[antraxbeta]

One of my fans on the cooler died for me to, and i fixed it by replacing it with a 9950x 64GB ram rtx4090 PC, ez cheap fix

[eco_craft]

We actually use the pxe boot with iscsi drives in the czech technical university in prague, however we use multiple operating system images, windows is installed locally on all machines, you network boot images like ubuntu, debian or other exam images like progtest or learnshell. Slight disadvantage is that when the network hiccups, all the computers freeze for a couple seconds.

[leafyon]

40 years of technological progress has finally allowed Linus to rediscover the benefits terminals and mainframes /s

[FujiLivz]

Not a shill, just a long time viewer who worked in IT. I used Acronis at one point for PXE boot with windows DCHP server handing out the address info, worked wonderfully and setup was painless. I had no idea what I was doing when I first tinkered with it, but the guides and tools they provide simplify things greatly. You basically just make a golden image, put it on a network share, tell dhcp to point to it, and let acronis do it's thing. You can point it to the acronis "cd image" instead (which is what we ended up doing), because if someone accidentally loaded into it, they'd know something was wrong and could exit, but if they needed to restore, we had a good interface to select backups from network shares easily, so a nice compromise. They were the only ones at the time that took care of ssd trimming properly and could boot on everything I threw at it. My skill level is mid on most things, so I think it's ease of use would make for a great sponsorship partner, the demographic is on point.

[BradleySmith]

The date is there so you know when the image was created. If you do any rollbacks or image swapping, you can just change the date, and it will automatically roll back.

[JackMBradley]

18:00 - "Half a second, you don't want to see that.... Yikes!" as he turns away and it jumps up to 1.1 seconds and drops down again before he can notice 🤣

[MikkoRantalainen]

16:10 If you didn't understand what happened here, the Windows installer installed the boot loader on wrong hard disk because Windows installer is buggy. If you try to do this for real, remove local storage from the system before installing Windows.

[Genzzry]

A video that I'd love to see SOMEONE make would be the cheapest usable Ceph NAS possible.

Basically, a NAS system with no single point of failure (unlike the one in this video), with the main focus being the cheapest possible build (with a few alternatives) would be a welcome change from the "we have an unlimited budget and custom parts you cant get, so this isn't something YOU can do" videos typically released by LTT, etc.

[mariuz-xnpi]

Video Idea: Build a water-cooled PC and route the cooling pipes through a heated bodysuit. This way, the PC stays cold while you stay warm! Perfect for winter gaming!