Dear List Persons:
I'm working on a perltk diskless boot floppy/exported root builder and
have it mostly working. I'm working with both 2.0 and 2.2 kernels.
When I run lilo -r on the floppy with a line like
root=/dev/nfs
or
root=/dev/nfsroot
according to the prescription, lilo complains that there is no such
device. If I remove the line, the diskless kernel boots and does indeed
mount root, but I worry about whether things are correctly set up for
later stages of the boot (which I'm still working out). Is this a known
problem? Is there a simple solution (like omitting the root line)?
A second observation -- half the difficulty of building a diskless host
is figuring out what to custom alter in the system rc scripts. I'd
really like to be able to use the same /etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit or rc.S on a
diskfull host and a diskless host, which would necessitate having some
sort of variable to add to wrap all the differentiated startup code,
e.g. fsck, network startup (which is already done for a diskless host).
Obviously I can kludge something. For that matter, I can make the
perltk script smart enough to rewrite the system startup script as it
makes the exported directory. However, if there is already a variable
accessible to the system to indicate that the startup is diskless (even
at a very early stage in the boot) then perhaps the creators of the
various distributions could be convinced to use it in their default
systems scripts so that I don't have to use a different kludge for every
distribution supported.
Is there such a variable?
rgb
Robert G. Brown http://www.phy.duke.edu/~rgb/
Duke University Dept. of Physics, Box 90305
Durham, N.C. 27708-0305
Phone: 1-919-660-2567 Fax: 919-660-2525 email:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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