Hello Toomas, many thanks for your explanations and the script so far!
On Mon, Jan 16, 2012 at 11:30:22AM +0200, Toomas Tamm wrote: > We have used diskless clients for years. I am typing this answer on > one :-) . [...] > Of course you also need to set up a server to export the root directory > with appropriate permissions and make sure that the NFS is efficient > and reliable in *your* network. My root is currently mounted as > rw,vers=3,rsize=32768,wsize=32768,namlen=255,hard,intr,nolock,proto=tcp, > timeo=7,retrans=3,sec=sys,mountproto=udp . Your preferences and > situation may vary. This is where I am working right now. I did not find a clear documentation on how to do the implementation (chroot and booting) best, by more or less try and error I ended up with something that magically works and already looks quite promising, however I would like to understand a bit more. Perhaps you or someone having deeper insights into the subject can give some comments, tips and tricks on what I did so far: I install the chroot with: export LC_ALL=C; fai -vNu diskless dirinstall /opt/live/filesystem.dir/ The FAI classes used are almost identical to a comparable disk installation; only /etc/hosts and /etc/resolv.conf need to be modified from what FAI produces. The directory /opt is exported via NFS (I can't use NFSv4, right?). Now I create the PXE configuration: ... kernel vmlinuz-2.6.32-5-486 append initrd=initrd.img-2.6.32-5-486 ip=dhcp root=/dev/nfs nfsroot=/opt boot=live I was not able to figure out what boot=live exactly means. What is the difference to boot=nfs? Are there other alternatives? When booting the client, it seems to pick up the hostname from dhcp/dns if it has been added to these services. This is already great. If the machine is unknown to dhcp/dns it picks up 'host'. Can I easily modify or influence this behavior? What's the recommended implementation? Problems I encountered before on debian-edu are security aspects: We would like to use Kerberos and NFSv4 for mounting the home directories. Of course a keytab in a readable chroot shared by many machines is not what you want. Any ideas how to handle that best? I documented what I got so far in more detail here: <URL:http://wiki.debian.org/DebianLAN/Setup_A> Hints, tips and tricks as well as pointers are appreciated. Thanks! Best regards, Andi
