DIskless client

[wa1gon]

Greetings,

I am trying to create a diskless clients using F6.

I took the pxe initrd.img and de-cpio it, but I have found that no matter what I do either the loader continues to run or I get kernel read errors of some sort. I can really see them because the messages to scrolling too quick.

From what I have read linuxrc or /init runs. I compiled busybox with the static option hoping to get a shell from it. No such luck. I tried to replace /init with a script that looks like this:

#!
/sbin/sh # static busybox link.

And it still runs loader.

1. What I need is a initrd, that I can get a shell.
2 I would like to understand why loader continues to run.
3. Understand how run a script instead of loader.

Once I have a script I can play with, then I can do the rest myself.

thanks
wa1gon

[sideways]

F6 is deprecated. Further, fedora is not aimed at diskless clients as it is a rapidly updated and experimental distro.

You'd be better off booting a liveCD image on the machines, that's pretty diskless.

[beaker_]

http://wiki.ltsp.org/twiki/bin/view/Ltsp/Documentation

Why reinvent the wheel?

[sideways]

good link!

specifically for fedora

https://fedorahosted.org/k12linux/

[beaker_]

I scored a few low end boxes (<10) and was considering this + respinning it with edu & kids games. A community center donation actually.

[wa1gon]

For business reasons that I won't bore you with, we have to use F6.

I have had quite a bit of success so far, but I am stumped on 2 things:

1. I can not get non-static programs to execute. Error: "portmap: not found"
I put /lib and /usr/lib in ld.so.conf and ran ldconfig to not avail.

2. pivot_root either returns invalid argument or directory not found.

Suggestions?

thanks
-wa1gon

[wa1gon]

I have gotten most of the problems worked out. Just one little nagging nit.

"/" fs doesn't show up on df. "/" is a RD.

Any clues?

thanks
-Darryl