Multiple Clients

["Dvir Oren" <dviro@hotpop.com>]

I'm trying to use etherboot to initialize a diskless computer which 
will, after initialization, run from flash.  What this means is that I 
need a system that will allow me to turn on a client which has 
nothing but empty flash, and an ethernet card, and after a few 
mintues of initialization, I'll have a new computer able to boot off the 
flash.

I ran into two problems:

1.  I can't seem to configure dhcp to allow any computer regardless 
of its mac address to get the tagged kernel.  dhcp will happily 
assign it an IP address, however the "filename" statement is only 
allowed inside a host {} section, which requires some sort of 
identification.  Has anybody been able to do something like that?  
Are you all keeping an endless track of mac addresses?  Anybody 
tried a solution to grab the mac address from the requesting 
computer, insert it into dhcpd.conf, and reload it?

2.  The other thing I can't seem to configure is the need to create a 
separate file system for each system that has to boot.  Suppose I 
want to have 10 diskless computers, why do I need to duplicate 10 
file systems on the server?  I suppose I could hard link most of the 
file system, and only create a new /var, /tmp and /proc perhaps 
(still there is a problem with /etc/mtab) for each client.  A better 
solution would be if I could make a single file system for all the 
computers, and let each computer have a ramdisk with only certain 
directories (/var, etc.).  Is there a way to do this?

---------
Dvir Oren <dvir@lucidvon.com>
Lucid VON Ltd.     <http://www.lucidvon.com>
9 Saloniki St.,        Tel-Aviv       Israel
Tel:  +972 3 644 3038  Fax:  +972 3 644 3039
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