On Mon, 2004-02-23 at 11:03, Gupta, Deepak (Deepak) wrote: > 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. > > 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?
To my knowledge, it's not documented as such, although the bits and pieces are. I think the simplest solution would be to mount a tmpfs filesystem in place of the nfs filesystem, and copy the files you need from the initrd. tmpfs allocates RAM pages based on actual storage needs, while the initrd image is a fixed size. > 2 If so, what are my limitations in terms of size of kernel/RAM > disk combined? Your limits are determined by the clients. You can increase them by adding more RAM, and decrease needs by including only what you need. > 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? This is in the initrd. You can gunzip the initrd, mount it with "mount -o loop initrd-... /mnt/initrd", and edit /mnt/initrd/linuxrc. Unmount /mnt/initrd, gzip it, test, and repeat until you're happy. For this kind of setup, I would strongly recommend that you severely limit what you put into the clients' filesystems. As a simple example, don't put "ls" on them if you don't need it. Test to see if you can't build what you need with a few carefully-chosen statically linked binaries, and build your kernel without loadable modules (build the appropriate ones into your kernel). Since LTSP is designed for use as a terminal, it's built to be flexible. For an embedded system, flexibility is a security problem. Strip out everything not absolutely necessary. Good luck! -- David Johnston <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Little Bald Consulting, LLC ------------------------------------------------------- SF.Net is sponsored by: Speed Start Your Linux Apps Now. Build and deploy apps & Web services for Linux with a free DVD software kit from IBM. Click Now! http://ads.osdn.com/?ad_id=1356&alloc_id=3438&op=click _____________________________________________________________________ Ltsp-discuss mailing list. To un-subscribe, or change prefs, goto: https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/ltsp-discuss For additional LTSP help, try #ltsp channel on irc.freenode.net
