[PLUG] Bpbatch

[Ian Burrell]

Michael C. Robinson wrote:
> 
> Has anyone accessed a local hard disk on a machine booted with LTSP?
> I wonder why in a default install of LTSP that you can't access the
> drive(s)?  There's something about accessing a local floppy drive
> but that looks like a major kludge.  Knoppix gives you local parition
> access, unfortunately you have to have a cdrom drive that can boot.
> 

The network booted kernel can certainly access local drives.  It is easy 
to netboot the installers for most distribution.  With a little 
customization, it is even possible to do automatic installs with the 
network booting.  I bet LTSP left out the drivers to access the hard 
disk because they designed for diskless operation and that saves lots of 
space in the kernel image.

> Does the root partition have to be in ram or on the local drive for me
> to be able to manipulate the local drive?  I guess no if sun used to put
> the swap partition on the local hard disk and have root somewhere else.
> I want to do something very similar except the local disk is not a
> temporary space, it's what I need to do backup and restoration
> operations on.
> 

The root filesystem can be anywhere that the kernel can access.  The 
options are ramdisk, NFS mount, or local drive.  Also, when using an 
inital ramdisk, the init program on the ramdisk can load modules, find 
the real root filesytem, mount it, and switch the root to the new 
filesystem.  This is how installers work.  They boot from the floppy 
with a minimal kernel and initrd and then load the root filesystem from 
the installation media.

> I've made Tom's root boot network boot by simply tagging a disk image
> copy of the Tom's kernel and initrd image if I remember right.  Are
> there any Linux distributions that are specifically written to be
> installed on a host server for boot by network clients?  I guess the
> issues that you have to look at closely is how to deal with temporary
> and log files when setting something like this up.  I think the only
> problems with using Tom's are twofold:  The backup/restore utilities
> don't work as expected,  there's no modern filesystem support for ext3
> and journaling.  Maybe I could get away with using a newer Tom's with
> ext3 support if it can mount an nfs drive that has the normal tar, etc.
> utilities.
> 

You can compile your own kernel with all the features you need.  That 
way you can compile all the drivers into the kernel and don't the 
initial ramdisk for the modules.  Also, if you use NFS mounted root 
filesystem, you can use more space than can fit into a ramdisk.

  - Ian

-- 
ian at znark.com
http://www.znark.com/