We have a need to run diskless linux telco-grade engines for one of our projects. So far, I have found a wealth of information from the LTSP web site, in fact I am close to getting a diskless client up and running.Question in contrary: How would you want to retrieve those files?
I have not done exhaustive research as yet, I am hoping that someone can point me in the right direction here. For our needs we would NOT like to use NFS (to mount root), but rather just continue to use the RAM disk. My questions:
1 Can I reconfigure (possibly recompile) the ltsp kernel with the RAM disk (initrd) that it initially downloads with such that I can add/remove contents to the RAM disk. If so, is there a documented procedure to do this?
IIRC, the workstations boot of an initial ramdisk (initrd), mount the NFS-dir /opt/ltsp/i386 from the NFS server onto something like /mnt and then change-root into this directory. You could manipulate the linuxrc-script (get the initrd kit which contains all that stuff) and comment out the line that does the mount. Instead you could e.g. use something like
cd /newroot wget -O- -q http://localserver/ramdisk-contents.tgz | gunzip -c | tar -x chroot /newroot
(remember: at the time of nfs-mounting, network is indeed configured)
You would need to put wget (+libraries) into the initrd as well, gunzip and tar probably too.
The command above (correct me if I was erroneus on parameters - read manpages!) would retrieve a compressed file which then would be decompressed into the ramdisk.
Remember this makes maintenance of lts.conf much more difficult.
2 If so, what are my limitations in terms of size of kernel/RAM disk combined?The initrd would need much space, about 70Ms reside in my /opt/ltsp/i386 (though I'm not sure which packages installed, this is my test server) which would need to be fitted into it.
3 Needless to say, I would need to configure the kernel config files to not mount root over NFS and swap the original RAM disk root. Is there a procedure for this as well?Read above.
Can you tell us why you don't want NFS?
Regards,
Anselm
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