PXE -> NBD -> Install Fedora?
Andy Green
fedora at warmcat.com
Tue Oct 7 21:06:28 UTC 2003
Hi -
Slightly unusual situation, my main terminal is currently a fanless
EPIA motherboard with a fanless PSU and no HDD. (The reason is the
complete silence.)
It boots over the network using PXE and mounts using NBD a 2G ext3
image stored in a file on the server. NBD is the Network Block
Device, a feature of the kernel that allows a remote file to appear
to be a local block device.
The 2G image is initialized mainly with RH9 RPMS via some custom
scripts at creation time on the server, this gives a working KDE
desktop and is working fine.
Rather than duplicate this effort for Fedora, I saw somebody mention
PXE being supported during Fedora install.... but is NBD supported by
the Fedora install? This would allow the remote filesystem to be
initialized from the client exactly as if it was a local drive and do
away with the need to prep the filesystem on the server at all.
NBD is mainly in the (stock, no patches needed) kernel, but you need
to run a small userland app on the server and client to point them at
each other.
-Andy
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