- From: Tim Holy <holy_at_pcg.wustl.edu>
- Date: Fri, 20 Jun 2003 10:23:59 -0500
Hello, In my lab we currently have 3 Linux data acquisition machines, plus a few Linux desktops. Because these machines have been installed at different times, lab-wide there are 3 different distributions (if you count versions), each has a different kernel, comedi version, etc.. By the end of the year, several of the machines will unfortunately have reached their end-of-life support as far as security patches from the distributor. For these reasons, I'm exploring the possibility of setting up single a Debian system for network booting (PXE). I'm wondering whether anyone on this list has any experience and/or advice about whether this is a good or bad idea. From the bit of reading I've done so far, one problem seems to be that: 1. It's nice to make /root available read-only, so that a single configuration can be shared among clients; 2. But if the hardware is different, I'll apparently have trouble with a single shared /dev filesystem. It's recommended (http://www.linux-mag.com/2002-10/netbooting_06.html) that one uses devfs to handle the hardware differences between machines. Comedi supports /dev but not /devfs, however. While I have no experience in these matters, it seems that it should be simple to put /dev (and /var, /tmp, and anything else?) on each of the local harddrives, and solve the hardware differences that way. Am I wrong? And a couple of points that may be off-topic for this list, but I mention them in case they might have implications for comedi: 1. Will NFS file locking (http://www.linux-mag.com/2002-10/netbooting_07.html) be an issue I need to worry about? Despite trying to find information in man pages and from HOWTOs on the web, I don't really understand what locking is, or when it would be a problem. 2. I notice that a lot of sites recommend using a ram disk for /var, but I don't see why this would be better than the local harddrive. Many thanks, --Tim Holy
Received on 2003-06-20Z14:23:59