[PLUG] boot from USB, run on RAID?

Galen Seitz galens at seitzassoc.com
Tue Jun 10 15:40:26 UTC 2008


Kurt Sussman wrote:
> All the big kids boot their servers from a USB stick, and run either
> diskless (SAN, mounted by the USB boot) or internal RAID. I'd like to
> understand this better. 
> 
> Does the USB key have to be unmounted after boot so it doesn't get worn
> out with excessive writes? It seems like I should be able to use the
> grub config to tell the booted system to look at the storage instead of
> the USB key; is there a good HOWTO for this?

Perhaps you could use noatime or mount it readonly and remount 
readwrite as necessary.

> 
> I recently tried to build a FreeDOS boot USB stick to upgrade the BIOS
> on a motherboard, but I have failed and I'm not willing to spend too
> much more time on it. HP is supposed to have a nice utility to build
> bootable USB keys on Windows, but all the links I've found on the HP
> site are broken. Any suggestions?

I posted some instructions on this to list a while back.

http://lists.pdxlinux.org/pipermail/plug/2006-August/049545.html


galen



More information about the PLUG mailing list