How to boot diskless clients using Larch?

tolsis · 2007-05-22 19:50:15

Gradgrind, many thanks for creating Larch, i read the scripts involved and show that you did a remarkable job.
I managed to install Larch successfully on a USB stick together with my customized profile and it is working very well.
Is is possible to boot diskless clients from Larch ? This is what i have done so far:

1. Installed tftfd,dhcp, nfs-utils and mkpxelinux on Larch
2. Configured DHCP for pxe: ( 192.168.0.1 is the IP address of the machine running Larch)

ddns-update-style interim;

subnet 192.168.0.0 netmask 255.255.255.0 {
option subnet-mask 255.255.255.0;
next-server 192.168.0.1;
filename "pxelinux.0";
allow booting;
allow bootp;
range 192.168.0.2 192.168.0.20;
}

3. Modified mkinitcpio.conf and added: MODULES="3c59x" . This is for the network card that the client uses. Also added 'net' in HOOKS before 'larch1 larch2 ...'
4. Created contents of /var/tftpboot by running: mkpxelinux -a
5. Shared via NFS: /.livesys/livecd . This is where the .sqf files where found on my Larch install.

The client gets an IP address and boots using this custom initrd. This also works if i use dnsmasq for everything instead of dhcpd + tftpd.
It hangs when it starts to look for the root file system.
I tried different combinations in the 'default' file , none of them worked. Here's what i have in 'default' now:

default arch
label arch
kernel vmlinuz
append initrd=initrd.img rootfstype=nfs nfsroot=192.168.0.1:/.livesys/livecd root=/dev/nfs

Has anyone tried this? Is my 'default' wrong or is it something else that i need to change e.g the 'larch1' hook?

Last edited by tolsis (2007-05-22 20:27:56)

gradgrind · 2007-05-23 05:38:01

Sounds a bit complicated, but it is an interesting experiment.

The boot parameters will be ignored by the larch initcpio scripts, you would indeed need to change the larch1 script to look for the nfs mount. As I haven't played around much with diskless clients recently, and not at all with pxe, I'm afraid I can't immediately give you any more tips.

tolsis · 2007-05-23 11:30:11

Thanks Gradgrind, i ll have a play with the hooks and report progress here

dh_swing · 2007-05-23 16:43:26

How timely. Last night I was wondering what a netboot option would look like in larch.

I could envision an addition hook added before larch1, that would mount the nfsroot and present this as the livecd root. Then a bit of work in larch1,2,3 to abstract that variable, and conceivably you could mount the squash files over nfs!

If possible, this is a powerful concept. Imagine thick clients that all boot from the same nfs base directory, using simple squash files. Perhaps you could have a "base" set of squash files that unioned together provide the base system for all machines, then adding additional sqf files at boot time could provide the extended system for the machine (workstation, mythserver, etc). One update to the base packages updates all the derived systems.

Also - I wonder what a sqf file containing a subset of frequently loaded binaries, copied to the ramfs at boot time would look like... Perhaps a small daemon that collects info about files you load frequently, then a manual procedure to create the sqf file based on this usage data.

Kind of a netboot/larch/puppy thingy.

Thoughts?

Arch Linux

#1 2007-05-22 19:50:15

How to boot diskless clients using Larch?

#2 2007-05-23 05:38:01

Re: How to boot diskless clients using Larch?

#3 2007-05-23 11:30:11

Re: How to boot diskless clients using Larch?

#4 2007-05-23 16:43:26

Re: How to boot diskless clients using Larch?

Board footer