Hi Jon,

Jon Peatfield wrote:
> Many thanks for this!  I was just reading through the pxe booting stuff at:
> 
>   http://linux.web.psi.ch/livecd/diskless.html
> 
> and thought I'd followed the instructions closely enough but kept 
> getting the boot failing 'cos I'd used a hostname rather than an IP 
> address in the nfsroot definition.  After that it worked like a charm.
> 
> I'm a little bit puzzled why a hostname doesn't work, by the time the 
> mount is attempted the dhcp client has already obtained a list of 
> nameservers and seems to have filled in resolv.conf.  Maybe the initrd 
> environment just hasn't got support for DNS lookups.  I'll look more 
> closely this afternoon but just thought I'd ask first...


In the initrd environment I use busybox to mount nfs.

 > livecd-2.7.4/linux-live.sl/initrd/static-binaries/busybox
BusyBox v1.7.1 (2007-09-21 01:50:40 CEST) multi-call binary

Some dhcp features are build in, but it seems that

mount -t nfs -o nolock,ro,rsize=8192,wsize=8192,hard,intr $NFSROOT $DIR

is not taking into account /etc/resolv.conf or it is not able to do a DNS lookup. I haven't looked closer into 
the busybox source code so far...


> 
> When doing the nfsroot thing is there a good reason to keep everything 
> in squashfs?  ie for testing a custom version can I arrange to just have 
> a suitable plain sl (installed) tree nfs mountable by clients?  That 
> will let me fairly easily tweak the set of packages and config until I'm 
> ready to build a set of custom .iso files...
> 


You're right. Keeping everything in squashfs makes no sense in NFS mounted environment. My idea was just to 
keep it simple - that means to have the same build scripts for a LiveCD/DVD as for a NFS mounted Live System. 
Of course, this is something I could put on the wish list of future livecd-build script versions.
Is anybody else interested in this "feature"?



> I'm considering making some custom local net-boot images - partly to 
> test/diagnose machines (though the standard livecd seems to contains 
> pretty much all one would need) and maybe to run some information 
> displays (they just need to boot with a slightly weird X config and 
> automatically run a web browser pointing at a suitable URL)...


This should be quite simple just download the latest livecd build scripts (livecd-2.7.4) and follow the 
description on http://linux.web.psi.ch/livecd/build.html


> 
> Obviously in such a setup one wouldn't want to nfs mount the nfsroot rw 
> so it would still need some kind of unionfs/aufs magic (at least for 
> things like /tmp etc).


Why do you need nfsroot rw? In this case one client can change the nfsroot of all other clients, which is 
maybe not desirable. Or would you provide for each client an own nfsroot?

Cheers,

	Urs