Re: 12 box network in small school

["Jonathan D. Proulx" <jon@ai.mit.edu>]

Hi,

Sorry if I'm coming into this late, I've been away from the list for a
while and blew away the 3k messages I hadn't read so only caught the
last post of this thread....

I've been working on an NFS root installer, which starts off
essentially diskless so it can repartition the harddrive(s).

One gotcha I found is that strange things can happen if /dev isn't
writable by root (by default nfs exports are root squashed so local
root=nobody on the NFS volume).

I worked around this by using a 2.4.x kernel with devfs, so that each
client has it's own writable devices without any possibility of
conflict with each other.  Traditionaly I think a compressed ramdisk
is loaded off the boot floppy and mounted on /dev (but I've not done
this).

The advantage of the devfs system is that you can just dump raw
kernels to floppy without mucking with lilo or syslinux, down side is
that running 2.4.x is slightly more adventuresome than stock stable
(though see http://www.debian.org/News/2001/20010415 for how to run
2.4.x with an otherwise stable system).

I'd be happy to go into more detail, but I really missed the question
:)

HTH,
-Jon