Re: Poor Man's XT doc (pre-releace)
On Thu, 13 Aug 1998, Stephen J. Carpenter wrote:
>>I have atteched here a document I am writting (mostly for my own interest)
>This is the "Poor Man's XT". The aim is to be a full doc on how to
>setup a debian linux system (based on 2.0) and make a working
>"XTerminal" out of it.
>The goals:
>1. Should be able to be diskless, booting wither form boot prom or
>a boot disk and NFS mounting the base system
>2. System should be as small as possible.
>3. Xserver etc should be able to be upgraded from dpkg
>
>accepted limitations:
>1. Assumes XTerminal AND machine hosting its root filesystem via NFS are
>on the SAME architecture.
That fits 99% of all cases, but I'd love to have some Pentiums as X servers
to an Alpha server!
>I am looking for any thoughts and suggestions on this, both technical and
>in style of writting. Also...as far as this Doc is written is as far
>as I have gotten with the project. I still have to work out the boot
>disk (I don't have the ability to use boot proms..yet..) and all the
>BOOTP/arp/rarp/NFS stuff....but so far it looks solid.
>(any suggestions on how to continue with the project will be apriciated
>too)
Go to ftp://ivanova.coker.com.au/pub/Linux/kern-bin and you'll find some NFS
packages of the 2.1 series kernels. The .deb files contain very recent
kernels that don't work properly, and archives such as 2.1.XXXnfs.tar.bz2
contain older versions that work well.
To create a kernel for NFS-root operation you just build a recent 2.1.x kernel
with "IP: Kernel level auto-configuration" enabled in the network options and
NFS-root enabled in the file systems.
Now create an nfs device file by:
mknod /dev/nfs c 0 255 ; chmod 600 /dev/nfs
That makes it possible to do "rdev kernel /dev/nfs" to setup NFS root
operation, then you can just use "cat" to put the kernel on the disk.
X terminals generally run in insecure places, we don't really want someone to
use a different kernel and take over the machine to create SUID programs on
the server. We may be able to run the X terminal with it's root file system
set up to be "root_squash" and have all files running as non-root. I haven't
tried this, but it should work (but may take a bit of hackery). Also
SUID-root programs on the NFS-root would have to be made non-SUID (probably a
good idea anyway if you want to have only 2 processes running on the machine).
One thing that's probably worth doing is running a spelling check (I know I
sound pedantic).
Good work on the document. As it stands it's a useful resource, I've learnt
some things already...
--
This is what they pay me for.
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