Re: the root filesystem

[Matthew Hoskins <mhoskins@microdsi.net>]

Greetings,  I am in the process of creating a diskless root filesystem for a
project i am involved in... Its a bit larger than most b/c i wanted a "swiss
army knife"...  Since server space is cheap its about 85M...

But, unlike a lot of rootfs's i've seen this one can be shared across all the
clients... The "/" dir is mounted ro,  and it maintains an intact rpm database
on the nfs server  to allow admin to install software in rpm format with the
--root  option.

When a node boots, It gets its own /var created in a very small ramdisk, just
large enough mainly for lock files.  Also it gets its own unique /tmp by
mounting a dir on the server named after the node's IP.  Finally it runs a
script also named after its ip, this allows different nodes to perform dif
functions... some can run pvm, some can run scripts written in perl (that was a
requirement of this project) and some could even be workstations or xterminals,
provided the correct software is installed...

Does this project sound useful to anyone other than myself?

I'm not using etherboot b/c i dont have access to a prom burner, and Intel
Management Adapters come with PXE proms that work well enough... But this
rootfs should work with any 2.2.x version kernel booted over a net..



raphael wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I've just install bootp,tftp, and NFS and all work fine, but I've problems
> to build a root filesystem for my client ( the trickiest part of the setup I
> guess ! ). I've download a small distribution of i386 linux : Linux-EMbedded
> and downloaded it in /tftpboot/my_client_name but it doesn't work, although
> all the required files are here. So, here is my question : how know files
> required by linux and how configuring them ?
>
> Thank you very much for your advices
>
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