[ale] Diskless

[Byron A Jeff]

> 
> Hello Everyone:
> 
> Has anyone had success with diskless PC's. I am trying to get
> my second computer to run diskless, and am having some
> trouble.

Not completely diskless. I've been working with NFS and Ramdisk filesystems
over the last few months. I've been booting either from the local harddisk
or floppy. Completely diskless operation requires a network loader on the
EPROM of the netcard. They exist but I haven't dealt with them yet.

Tell us about the configuration of both your PC's and how you are trying
to get diskless operation from the second machine.

> 
> I'm able to get the kernel to load, and decompress, INET starts
> to run, but the shared libraries arn't available. -- Seems we
> have a chicken and the Egg problem. Need to find some way
> to get the library cash file pointing to the right file system
> for the client.

It seems a NFS root filesystem would help here. You can create an entire
filesystem on your primary machine and use NFS to serve that filesystem.
Check out the nfsroot.txt file in the kernel's Documentation directory.

> 
> Also, Is there any way to not have extra copies of the binaries
> laying around, Curently I have an entrie file system for the client
> on the server. Would like to share as many of the binaries as possible.

Usually the /usr filesystem is completely sharable. Many systems (such as X)
will create links into the /var filesystem for system dependant stuff. You
can make /usr read-only and have multiple systems access it with no problems.

> 
> Does anyone know what the minimun file system is ? How thin can the
> client file system be? Right now, I'd be happy with a root prompt 
> on the client.

Start with an install rootdisk. It'll give you that prompt. Unfortunately
most of those are still a.out executables and libs. I believe that the
latest DLX single disk rootdisk is ELF based.

Hope this helps,

BAJ