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... 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... 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)... 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). -- Jon Peatfield, Computer Officer, DAMTP, University of Cambridge Mail: [log in to unmask] Web: http://www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/