Diskless & Thin Systems

[Jason Straight]

On Sunday 19 March 2006 23:40, Barry Dexter A. Gonzaga wrote:
> Good day!
>
> On Sun, Mar 19, 2006 at 10:39:38PM -0500, Jason Straight wrote:
> > I've recently installed a new lab at our local library, and I have a few
> > suggestions that could make ubuntu more thinclient/diskless friendly out
> > of the box.
>
> 	Also finished converting our 60 diskless gentoo workstations to ubuntu.
> Had to wait for a key kubuntu kinks in handling floppy mounts before
> deploying.

Yeah, one of the reasons I went with dapper. New KDE and hal handles storage 
device mounting better except that hal apparently has a bug with floppies, so 
floppy support with kubuntu/dapper isn't quite up to the task yet either. Oh 
the irony.

> > 1. Compile in kernel ip autoconfig and dhcp
> > 2. Compile support for booting from NFS
>
> 	Not necessary.
>
> 	/etc/mkinitramfs/initramfst.conf
> 	-BOOT=local
> 	+BOOT=nfs
>
> 	recreate your initrd/initramfs. you can also supply your nfs root
> 	via kernel commandline nfsroot=$SERVERIP:$PATH.
>
> 	<SNIP>

Yeah, I got that taken care of now, thanks.

> > *What I find odd is that it seems different systems I install ubuntu
> > (dapper included) seem to mount some /var dirs tmpfs (err
> > varrun,varlock), while other times not. What's the criteria that decides
> > this during installation?
>
> 	on dapper var/{run,lock} is tmpfs mounted, not on my breezy expert
> installs.
>
> 	Do take a look at ltsp init scripts, they were very enlightening on my
> setups.

Also when sharing root fs, during startup of I think enterprise volume evms it 
creates /.var.run and /.var.lock then removes them, so you might end up with 
workstation 1 removing those while workstation 2 is trying to use them. I 
hacked up initrd's init to mount / on a unionfs which can solve that problem 
but creates many more.


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