Re: Diskless boot NFS server image
> This is a problem, but no matter what you do, I think there always will be
> problems... Opinions anyone?
yes, you can't fix it without haveing full installations on every machine.
> Of course, you could keep a seperate /usr, maybe one for each group,
> but this would use heaps of extra disk space, and might still break
> during big updates. It would be easy for me to make this another
> config option, however I don't think it is worth it...
i don't think it's worth a config options. this is something every admin has to
keep in mind, but we can't do anything to make improve the situation.
dokument it, so people will know.
> Some programs are still very awkward, eg
> ssh - creates a private key for the host in /etc/ssh
all clients have the same host key :-( this isn't good, but it's the only
way i can manage host keys. (public computer pool - people destroy software
very often (to install games), so we install machines very often again).
> fdutils - configures floppy disks devices depending on how many floppy
> disks are installed, currently my program copies all devices
> from the master system, so if the master only has one disk
> drive, you want get the newer devices for other drives.
people need only /dev/fd0 and /dev/fd0u1440 and /dev/fd0u720.
maybe all /dev/fd0 devices, but everything else isn't needed.
> 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.
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 :-(
andreas
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