Re: Sharing /usr over net
Hans Erik Martino Hansen:
. In the building I live in, we have a small network. A fellow
. student who usually runs MSD*S on his machine wanted to be able to
. run linux without repartitioning and using as little harddiskspace
. as neccecary. I tried to hack an installation using UMSDOS and the
. Debian installation disks. But all my hackerskills wasn't enough, I
. think it is impossible.
Not at all. The missing elements you need are:
(1) a kernel with umsdos support compiled in (as opposed to umdos via
a loadable module).
and
(2) the umsdos support utilities -- particularly, the misnamed umssync
(which you need to run on your dos directory to start providing umsdos
support).
There's a bit of futzing around to get around the current installation
system's lack of support for umsdos -- you need to shell out to mount
the umsdos partition initially. Then, after things are built, you
need to shell out again to get /etc/fstab right. Note that fsync is
going to be useless on a umsdos partition -- but you don't have to
deal with this right away because the only immediate consequence is
that you get a spurious error message [you might want to be stringent
about making backups].
. The installationdisks requires an ext2 partition for root, and if I
. mounted the UMSDOS partition in /root it didn't recognize it. The
. end of the story was that I installed on my own dospartion /etc
. /bin /sbin /var and some other directories there, entered dos
. arj'ed it and extracted it on his machine, and with a little
. adjustment it worked fine.
I don't know what sort of problem you ran into -- the installation
menu just asks you for what path you want as root, if it's already
mounted it doesn't care what file system is present.
. My question is now:
.
. wouldn't it be nice if the installation program supported umsdos
. partitions
I think this would be a good idea.
. and supported some sort of server client concept where you
. installed packages on the server and they were automatically
. installed on the clients (of course only the files that are
. resident on that machine)
You might want to talk to David Silber (dhs@firefly.com), he's working
on the design concept for a backup system and has some analogous
ideas.
--
Raul
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