On Monday 29 November 2004 14:29, Dimitrie O. Paun wrote: > Hi folks, > > Hot on the heels of Stateless Linux, I decided to give the whole > diskless workstation idea a try. In doing so, I realized it would > be a good idea if I could create an image that I could later serve > via NFS to my diskless clients, and it seemed like anaconda is the > answer to all my problems. > > However, after a cursory look at the documentation and the source, > I can't seem to figure it out. What I want from Anaconda is: > -- to skip all the questions about formatting and so on that > are really applicable to a real image, and just go to the > application selection screen. This seems doable via > kickstart, right? > -- install the selected RPM's into a directory of my choosing. > Now this seems to be a perfect fit for anaconda, but it's > not at all aparent how to accomplish it. > > Am I missing something? If not, and the feature is to be implemented, > would it be a big deal? If it's not a huge effort, I'd be willing to > implement it, with a bit of guidance from the anaconda-gurus. But > before I set out on this path, is this a desirable feature for anaconda, > or is there another way that I have overlooked? If you scout around the User Mode Linux project at sourceforge you sould be able to find a script to create RHL (and maybe Fedora) filesystems. Alternatively, you could do an install on a real computer and use its filesystem as a starting-point. Depending on your particular aims there will be less or more mucking around: you will want to share /usr as read-only but clients will expect to write in /var and /home. Additionally you will want either per-host /etc or a means of patching a copy early in he boot process. You might wish to go with a custom kernel that supports / on NFS and has the driver for your NICs hardwared in and supports boot-time DHCP. Or you can diddle round with an initrd and a standard kernel. I don't know whether the standard kernel supports swap on NFS; there used to be a patch someplace but I never bothered with that. You could also consider having disk to support swap and some local data (no, not compact flash, it's not fast and it wears out) such as /var. That does not preclude booting the OS off the LAN. Depending on your performance requirements and the size of the software set you could also consider booting and loading everything into a RAM disk. Load on the LAN at boot time will be hell, but after that .... I suspect that a lot of what Anaconda does is completely irrelevant to what you want to do. -- Cheers John
