[plug] Installing Debian

[Trevor Phillips]

The Thought Assassin wrote:
> 
> > This is also interesting from the perspective of running a thin-ish client
> > with the major partitions mounted via NFS. You would only really need
> > /boot and /var on the client I believe?
> 
> If that. /var can be non-local or volatile. (but not shared)
> /boot is necessarily local, if you have a /boot. Otherwise you can boot
> from the network and dispense with local disks altogether. (still a good
> idea to have a local swap partition, though, and some things might be
> worth storing or caching locally for speed reasons)

I set up a lab of PCs to dual-boot into Linux, using NFS-Root. I found that
/etc/ had to be writeable as well, for files like /etc/mtab. Obviously, you
don't want them writing to your REAL /etc. How I did it was for those
partitions they needed write access, I created a dummy drive in scratch space
on the local machine's D drive, by zeroing a file (using dd and /dev/zero),
formatting it & mounting it using the loopback over the top of the normal
locations. I did this for /etc, /var, /tmp, and I think one other (it was a
while ago now ^_^). The root was a read-only NFS shared from a local server.

Writeable /etc also lets you customise bits on a per-machine basis.

-- 
. Trevor Phillips             -           http://jurai.murdoch.edu.au/ . 
: CWIS Systems Administrator     -           T.Phillips at murdoch.edu.au : 
| IT Services                       -               Murdoch University | 
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