[plug] Boot Sequence and dependant files.

[Craig Ringer]

> Yes, that is probably something I will look at, it might fit the purpose. 

It's handy, though it'll leave a lot of things unconfigured that it'd be 
nice to have running, and install a lot of things you won't need (apt, etc).

> The clients in question are diskless clients and so are mounting the root directory from the server via NFS
> Basically I am trying to make a client's root footprint as small as possible as this is stored on the server and exported via NFS. 

You _will_ run into problems with NFS root and Debian (or any normal 
distro). Currently most distros assume that the root FS is read/write, 
and since you really shouldn't be exporting the rootfs read/write they 
run into trouble with things like mtab and all sorts of other things. 
This can be worked around to a fair degree by having bind-mounting 
subdirectories of a ramdisk to various places like /tmp, /var/tmp, 
/var/run, etc and using symlinks from other places to the ramdisk. 
Nonetheless, it's a pain.

If you are going to have a r/w rootfs, you'll probably need separate 
copies - one per client - because they'll conflict. There are also the 
serious security implications of r/w NFS without kerberos, etc. One 
alternative is to use something like nbd (capable of copy-on-write) set 
up via an initrd, but I've had issues with the reliability of nbd.

I've been there, done that, and am now happily using LTSP. A lot of fuss 
can be saved that way. Of course, LTSP isn't really engineered to run 
apps locally on the clients (it can do it, but it's a pain in v3 - v4 is 
much better like that but still beta) so unless you're looking to use 
remote X it's probably not for you.

> On the topic of NFS, has anyone looked at or tried the "coda" filesystem I keep seeing in the kernel and meaning to get around to trying?

I haven't, no. I doubt that the kernel supports it as a rootfs option 
directly - you'd probably need to make an initrd that set everything up 
then used pivot_root .

Craig Ringer

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