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Hi -
NFS diskless booting is well established for Linux and works reasonably well, if a little slowly.
However Linux also supports a "Network Block Device", in Redhat modularized as nbd.ko, which is capable to make a remotely served file appear as a local block device, eg, /dev/nda. You can mount this device as if it was a regular local HDD. It operates very quickly over the network and is perfectly capable to replace a local Hard Drive. (In fact depending on the server spec, it can operate faster than a local HDD).
The silentcat project consists of instructions on setting up PXELINUX, DHCP and TFTP, some usermode code and scripts to generate a 1GB ext3 filesystem file on a Linux server, and export this using the NBD protocol such that a diskless client PC can boot from the server over the network and have the remote filesystem file exported over NBD come up as the root filesystem on the client machine.
The scripts also install a minimal runlevel 3 Fedora Core 3 distro into the remote filesystem by auto-downloading a minimal set of FC3 RPMs and installing them into the filesystem. Yum and RPM are included in this minimal set, so once you boot your client from this filesystem you can pull in any other RPMs you need (x.org. KDE, samba, etc) conveniently using yum. The base, update and Dag repos are configured for use with yum.
Multiple clients are supported from a single server, each directed to its own filesystem based on client PC MAC address.
~From the server point of view, exporting NBD filesystem files is a lot simpler, faster and more secure than NFS, particularly is circumstances forced the use of "no root squash".
Silentcat is in use here with a diskless EPIA board that boots into KDE and performs mplayer-based mediaplayer duties and is proving very fast and reliable.
http://warmcat.com/silentcat has the details and scripts. Comments welcome!
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