Re: Diskless Debian, Shared /usr, etc...
On Fri, May 01, 1998 at 08:13:29PM -0500, Jeff Noxon wrote:
> I'm about to set up a diskless Debian workstation. It's going to be
> booting over NFS using 2Mbps Wavelan... I know, not fast, but it's just
> going to be dishing out .MP3's to my stereo system -- so quietness and
> heat are the major concerns here.
>
> I know I can just do a full install in some subdirectory on my main box,
> but can I be more conservative with disk space and share some partitions
> between both installations? Any tricks, caveats, HOWTO's, etc?
I've been playing with this recently; I have a whole lot of motherboards
and net cards which I want to use to get some parallel processing happening.
I suggest the NFS-Root and NFS-Root-Client mini-howtos. What I have
ended up doing is creating a tree with just enough of /bin, /sbin/,
/etc, /var and /tmp to boot up in it, then the client will mount
the server's /bin, /sbin, /home and /usr over the top. I have about 3.5mb
per client and I am hoping to thin this out some more. (Unfortunately,
the startup scripts require bash, and bash + libreadline + curses etc
are huge.) This way I have effectively got a Debian system remotely,
although it can't be used for package installation/deinstallation etc
of course because /usr is readonly, and /var and /etc are machine-specific.
Hamish
--
Hamish Moffatt, hamish@debian.org, hamish@rising.com.au, hmoffatt@mail.com
Latest Debian packages at ftp://ftp.rising.com.au/pub/hamish. PGP#EFA6B9D5
CCs of replies from mailing lists are welcome. http://hamish.home.ml.org
--
To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-request@lists.debian.org
with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmaster@lists.debian.org
Reply to: