Re: Multiple Clients

[kimo_sabe@atdot.org]

On Fri, Jan 21, 2000 at 08:05:03PM +0200, Dvir Oren wrote:
> 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?
  I'm glad you asked. Consider this documentation.
  Yes you can do it, and it work's great. We have a lab of 11 systems
booting out of the same NFSroot. There are, of course a few little thing you
need to handle. First off, yes, ramdisks. Only /tmp, /var/tmp, and /var/run
really need them. If you want to run gdm, or something else that stores
runtime specific info elsewere(like /var/state) you should try to convince
it to use one of the existing ramdisks. gdm has an option in the config file
for it. The reason not just to make /var/state, or all of /var for that
matter a ramdisk is that there is information that is just there, but not
related to runtime stuff. Like, in our case, the Debian package lists.
  For the /etc/mtab problem, no problem. Just replace it with a symlink to
/proc/mounts and make sure your startup scripts don't change that. As proc
is a magical filesystem, it doesn't matter what is under it on the master
server, as long as the directory exists.
  As for system specific stuff, try to keep it to only network information,
which can then be assigned by bootp.  If you have a mixture of ps/2-variant
and serial mice you can setup a gpm that listens to all of them and repeats
the data for X to read.  If that proves insufficient for system
piculiarities you can use the bootp assigned hostname/ip do distinguish
between the systems.  This is part of why we use bootp instead of dhcp, it
allows us to cleanly tie systems to ips/hostnames(bootptab is cleaner to
look at for single system associations than dhcpd.conf)

  I think those are all the important points to sharing and NFS root, but
I'm not sure. If there is anything I missed please let me know, I want to
write a good HOWTO for it.
 
  - Nick Lopez
    kimo_sabe@atdot.org
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