Re: Diskless boot NFS server image

[Brian May <bam@snoopy.apana.org.au>]

Andreas Jellinghaus wrote:
>> Ideally, it should be possible to somehow support diskless systems
>> directly into dpkg, however this is beyond the scope of my efforts.
>
>how would such a support look like ? i have to admit, i don't know how.

Me either ;-)

You would probably have to have a delayed postinst mechanism that
executes on the diskless client. This sounds
awful just thinking about it... For instances, the client
might be turned off. Maybe it could be possible, but
it would require a lot more effort in thinking it over. This
would also require the system operator to manuall configure
each host. terriable. Maybe when Debian gets unattended package
installs it would be better.

Probably some sort of rules files would be required to, similar
to mine, so you can say which directories are to go where...

Support for installing onto multiple hosts at the same time
would need to be supported (eg for sharing /usr).

Don't ask me about preinst, postrm and prerm scripts ;-)

>the only thing i can think of is an exclude mechanism (for example,
>to skip /usr files). then i can install packages on every machine without
>problems. it will still break in some situations (e.g. the old version of
>some program is required in the pre/post-rm script), but it will work
>in most cases. update-info and such programs will still cause some problems.
>or the font packages (running mkfontdir on the read-only mounted /usr).
>
>> If I haven't documented anything adequately, then please let me know.
>
>there was documentation ? i thought i looked at all files in the source
>tar.gz and didn't find much. start with "which directories will exist,
>what will be in there", continue with "what programs exist, what do they"
>and then the configuration.
>
>i didn't read the perl scripts. if there is documentation embeded, i'm likely
>to miss it. also maybe i was too fast with looking at the next file in some
>cases :-(

/usr/doc/diskless/README.Debian.gz

and 

/usr/doc/diskless/TODO

Brian May <bam@snoopy.apana.org.au>