Re: Diskless boot NFS server image
useing diskless machines or even machines with only some disk space (and other
stuff mounted via nfs) isn't very easy. every package providing stuff for this
should give a warning if it touches the main system.
i had one try with doing everything via nfs, but not with one root for every
machine, but one root for all machines. first i useed the 2.0 kernel transname
patches (they allow to redirekt any operation on "file" to "file#host=<host>"
or "file#type=<type>", but only if such a file does exist).
later i moved to 2.1 kernels, where transname is no longer available, so
i did build some script mechanism: the machines booted not init but a script
in /etc/client/. there were special scripts, like X to "grep `hostname`
/etc/client/<somefile>". these files had informations like "which Xserver"
or cpp parameters to generate the XF86Config from one global one.
but this is also a very ugly approach.
no i ended up with a small linux installation on every machine,
mounting /usr, /home and /opt via nfs. to update the machines,
i can ssh to every machine as root without passwd, and use "rsync"
to update files. 90% of the script is "--exclude" parameters.
(available on demand). a second script acts as daemon, useing "rwho"
to find out which machine is up, and starting the sync scripts.
but even this approach has many problems. for example, if
the update process is interrupted, it can lead to stuff like
installing the machine again...
it could be very helpfull, if all machines were real debian systems.
no, i don't have disk space for /usr on the machines.
my idea is this: implement some filter mechanism into dpkg,
so one can say "--exclude=^/usr".
then you can still do real installations, and i hope this will
make updates much easier.
will look at your package.
andreas
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