Re: Sharing /usr over net

[rdr@tad.micro.umn.edu]

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