On Monday 09 Jul 2012 10:10:07 Damjan wrote: > Has anyone done any research on stateless ArchLinux instances. > > A stateless Arch would be one where the root filesystem is mounted > read-only and nothing changes there. Thus it can mounted over network > (using NFS, NBD and similar) by several, diskless, PCs at the same time. > > I plan to have per user HOME directories on a server (again NFS or > similar), and users credentials in LDAP. > > /var/run beeing a link to a tmpfs /run, and by using systemd-journal > without /var/log/journal (it will store logs in memory) a lot of things > avoid hitting the disk already. > > I'd use connman for handling the net connection and it seems to require > a writable /var/lib/connman/ > > > Anyone with any experience with this? I run an ArchLinux processing cluster for work. The nodes are diskless, so I can certainly offer some advice for getting this setup to work. Most important tip: don't try to use NFSv4. You can't boot Arch over NFSv4 yet. My setup has the nodes mounting root rw, but in practice they never touch it except for when I run an upgrade or do some manual configuration, which I usually do from a node (because it's easier). Each node has a separate /var directory stored on the server. I added a script that uses the initscripts hooks to mount the correct /var for each node based on its hostname (which is assigned via DHCP). If you don't care about retaining state, you could probably mount /var as a tmpfs and copy a template into it, which would avoid needing to create a directory on the server for each node. I'd be happy to provide further details if you'd like some pointers, but I got most of the important information from the Wiki, so pretty much all you need is there. Paul
