Re: booting diskless(!) linux-pc from WinNT?

[Matt Hortman <mbhortman@ibm.net>]

> Is there anybody how has any experience in remote-booting a several
> diskless(!) linux-PC´s from a WinNT-Station? I think the main problem will
> be NFS on the WinNT-Machine to supply the clients with their root-directory.

I had something very similar working at one point.  The problem I ran into is 
that the NT file system cannot represent the contents of the /dev directory.  
Because of that, I couldn't have the linux kernel mount the root over NFS.  
What I did instead was create a RAM disk that has the /dev directory and the 
bare minimum required to mount NFS.  The RAM disk contents are downloaded with 
the linux kernel by etherboot and then the scripts executed by init mount the 
rest of the directories needed...

The other problem I had is that the NT versions of tar didn't handle the file 
permissions correctly.  To get the files onto NT, I had to set up the NT NFS 
server and mount on a full Linux box.  Then I copied the necessary files onto 
the NFS directories.  Most good NFS servers will remember the permissions when 
set that way...

If you need more help with that, feel free to email me directly.

-Matt



===========================================================================
This Mail was sent to netboot mailing list by:
Matt Hortman <mbhortman@ibm.net>
To get help about this list, send a mail with 'help' as the only string in
it's body to majordomo@baghira.han.de. If you have problems with this list,
send a mail to netboot-owner@baghira.han.de.