From: byron@cc.gatech.edu (Byron A Jeff) Subject: Re: Almost-diskless linux Date: Sat, 21 Aug 1993 22:11:33 GMT
In article <2560hl$b5h@news.u.washington.edu>,
Liem Bahneman <roland@cac.washington.edu> wrote:
>
>I've been trying to work on a rahter interesting problem:
>
>Say I've got 10 386's with only a single high-desnsity floppy drive, and I
>wanted to nfs mount an entire operational filesytem from a single linux
>server, would it be possible with a single bootdisk? (Basically I'd like
>to run everything on the pcs via nfs.) Is this possible?
>Each machine has it's own ip address si I'd like to have all the abilities,
>like telnet, ftp, etc. I guess it'd be like these computers were dumb
>terminals, but not so dumb, as they would do all the work instead of the
>single server doing everything. Has anyone had any success with such a
>situation? Someone posted long ago about diskless nfs booting, if they
>could respond would be much appreciated as I've lost their post.
It's definitely possible. I mean the distribution floppies can mount and run
programs via NFS. I also read that NFS has been fixed so that shared libs
can be done. So build a boot/root floppy (or use a distribution one)
and mount /usr and /etc from the server on boot. You may want to to set up
a link from /etc and /usr to somewhere local on the floppy.
A couple of issues:
- Swap. You think HD is slow wait til you try over the network.
- Root on floppy. Very slow. You could put it an a RAMDISK.
How much memory do these 386's have? You'd probably not want to have to
swap and you would like to have a RAMDISK root. 8 is good, 12 is better,
16 or better is best. But for the cost of 16 Meg of memory you can just
buy a 340 (or much smaller) Meg HD.
It may be usable with 8 Meg of memory and a RAMdisk root. But I'd test it
first.
Hope this helps,
BAJ