[plug] diskless workstation

[Nick Bannon]

On Wed, Jan 12, 2000 at 11:07:25AM +0800, Luigi Cantoni wrote:
> I am wishing to setup a couple of systems as diskless workstations.
> Main system is a linux box.
> Diskless workstations are just PC with no floppy etc
> just a network card.

First, have a read of the Diskless HOWTO.

It comes down to picking a way to get your kernel loaded, and telling
it where to mount its root filing system. After that, it's pretty much
business as usual.

For a simple solution that I ran with for a few months on my home machine,
keep the floppy, but you might want to mount it internally. (use a 3.5"
mounting bracket inside a 5.25" bay) Compile a kernel with NFS-root
support and boot it, using SYSLINUX, pointing at a NFS server that
has a working installation. (dump and restore a working installation,
or perhaps use the Debian base2_1.tgz image)

With 48MB of RAM and no swap, performance was fine. Netscape ran a bit
slowly, due to interminable scanning through its "disk" cache. I also ran
into an issue with a BSD (NEXTSTEP) NFS server versus a Linux client,
which stopped dpkg from running. I assume that's long gone now, but I
should try it again.

For a true diskless solution, you'll want to burn yourself a bootrom and
stick it into a network card, then load your kernel with TFTP. I also
now have a few ISA cards, filled with EPROMs, that pretend to be a floppy.

Swap issues should be better now - it used to depend on patches to swap
over NFS, but the network block device support in Linux 2.2 should make
things straightforward.

Nick.

-- 
  Nick Bannon  | "I made this letter longer than usual because
nick at it.net.au | I lack the time to make it shorter." - Pascal