Boot many machines via bittorrent

Description of the project: Network booting is widely used today: for thin-client computing, cluster computing, operating system installation and context switching in classrooms (i.e., for exams or different lessons). Currently available netboot protocols are the "trivial file transfer protocol" (TFTP) and "hypertext transfer protocol" (HTTP). When a group of machines need to simultaneously boot, the boot server becomes a bottleneck and it is very easy to reach the server network capacity, thus grinding the whole system to a halt. P2P network booting could relieve the server burden and some solution already "exists", but they are either too complicated, very O.S. specific or even "described in a paper but unavailable"... At Università di Milano (Italy) I supported a thesis that succeded in creating a (GPL-licensed) BitTorrent based two-phase booting system, implemented in a less-than-a-hundred-lines script achieving an almost flat boot time with respect to the number of nodes booting together. This project proposal aims at (at least) "packaging" it into a standard Debian package, then expanding it into a more automated e user-friendly product, maybe also integrating it into the famous LTSP project.