[TLUG] (remote) install fest

[Fraser Campbell]

On Wednesday 17 December 2003 21:58, William Park wrote:

> > Incorrect.  PXE is about getting a kernel loaded into memory, the same
> > job and purpose as etherboot, netboot or romamatic.  PXE facilitates
> > LTSP it definitely does not obsolete it.
>
> Here we go again...  After you boot and mount NFS root, you're looking
> at the root tree that used to be local harddisk (except now it's
> remote).  You tell me why LTSP is necessary.

My main point was that PXE doesn't obsolete LTSP, how you get a kernel to your 
diskless workstation is irrelevant to the system you're booting (be that LTSP 
or whatever you're suggesting)..  It's quite possible that I misunderstand 
what your saying can be done.

If you boot a diskless workstation from "bigserver" are you suggesting that 
bigserver's / filesystem should be mounted as / on diskless workstation?  If 
so (correct me where I am wrong) you would have to modify countless items on 
the server's root filesystem to make it work correctly:

- /etc would be shared ... do you write a pile of custom init scripts for
  handling things that need changing depending on whether / is being mounted
  locally or by nfs?
- how do you handle writable dirs such as /tmp, /var/tmp and /var/log ... do
  you just let both diskless workstations and bigserver write to them as they
  see fit (sounds like a nightmare to me)

Regardless of whether you're talking about mounting server / on client / or 
/server/somerootfs as / on client the advantage of LTSP is that all the 
hacking you need to do to get it working smoothly has been done for you.

Perhaps you can walk me through how you configure a diskless client so that I 
understand what you mean?

-- 
Fraser Campbell <fraser-Txk5XLRqZ6CsTnJN9+BGXg at public.gmane.org>                 http://www.wehave.net/
Georgetown, Ontario, Canada                         Debian GNU/Linux

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