Re: Multiple Clients

[Robert Thompson <robertt@stargate.cs.swau.edu>]

On Fri, 21 Jan 2000, 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?


Yes; you can do one other thing too. You can make one filesystem that
decides who it is based on the machine's IP. This requires a bit of
surgery in some scripts. If you combine your last idea above with this,
(_one_ ramdisk that figures out who it is based on its eth0 ip, and mounts
most everything else from nfs) you will probably be happiest.


If you need more pointers, I have a rather crude example that is part of a
similar system for my labs. The main difference is that I am rsyncing a
bunch of drive-based windows machines. I use the netbooted linux
filesystem to mount up drive C: and sync it up to a server-copy of my
filesystem. I then generate the few patches to the registry to give the
machine an identity of its own. I prefer this because I don't have to use
nfs at all.


|
|---------
|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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-- 
=========================================================================
Robert Thompson <thompson@cs.swau.edu>  Southwestern Adventist University
"My opinions are my own. Want one?"      Department of Computer Science

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