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Re: Install Sarge on a diskless workstation ?

Thorsten Sauter wrote:

Hi Lee,

* Lee Mitchell <lee@spamtastic.demon.co.uk> [2004-03-02 22:35]:
| Any help would be much appreciated, even if its just a simple "sorry not | supported yet message" cos at the moment i'm just convinced i'm doing | something dumb ! 

yes. That's is.
NFS isn't supported by the debian-installer boot kernel, so you will be
unable to mount *any* nfs partition. This kernel option isn't enough for
nfs access. You will also need the nfs userland binaries and of course
the portmapper program. All of them are not available in d-i (yet?).

If you install you main-system kernel at a later point in d-i you will
run into the next problem. No of the debian default kernels support
nfsroot out-of-the-box. So you must provide your own mirror/cdrom to
install d-i with such custom requirements.

I can't see the point why we should support installing on nfs volumes.
You can simply debootstrap in on the nfs master machine, or if it isn't
a Linux system you can easily copy the contents from an other machine
into the nfsroot.

Bye
Thorsten


p.s. I don't think Sarge will run without any changes in the initscripts
from a nfsroot (ro)


Hi-
	I think it would be very useful to support installing onto NFS volumes.
At my site we operate these big netapp NFS file servers (filers). They have no intelligence except to serve NFS volumes, i.e. there is no real 'os' on them. If we could support installing TO an NFS root, we could use diskless workstations & servers that would install to their own volume on the filers. Then, the filer takes care of stuff like redundancy. This might also help for a situation where the NFS master server is one architecture (i386) and the machine you want to install 'to' is different, i.e. powerpc / mainframe. Also, I think that it would be very useful if DI supported installing FROM an NFS volume. Using an NFS volume is more flexible for testers than the initrd.gz files. If the kernel supported NFS root, could just mount it's root directory & init & etc, it would be possible to tinker with a running installer system, add drivers as needed, etc. without having to re-make the initrd.gz file, which is not easy. 

erik
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