My Gentoo diskless install howto

jesse_kahtava · Posted: Thu Jan 25, 2007 3:27 pm Post subject:

yes, within a chroot. the nfs mount contains a complete filesystem (with /lib and all) that i had created for the computer before deciding i wanted it diskless. After mounting the nfs volume i was able to chroot into it and execute init. It fails with a timeout, not because it can't be found or because of any sort of seg fault which gives me a good idea that it's there and should be working under normal circumstances. and as i said before, it is in the standard location (/sbin/init)

jesse_kahtava · Posted: Thu Jan 25, 2007 7:23 pm Post subject:

I found the problem! It seems that Reiser4 and NFS don't cooperate well when mounting NFS root. I made a new partition, formatted it with Reiser3, copied the full root contents from the Reiser4 partition over, set up /etc/exports to point to the new mount point with Reiser3 and everything works fine. After realizing this was a problem I googled around a bit and found a handful of references to Reiser4 not working 100%.

!!!As of this writing Reiser4 does not work being exported and used as a NFS root!!!
(Well, not for me anyway)

erik258 · Posted: Thu Jan 25, 2007 7:30 pm Post subject:

that explains it. I have mine on reiser3. I've thought about switching my workstation over, what do you think?
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Mgiese · Veteran Joined: 23 Mar 2005 Posts: 1630 Location: indiana

hi there,

just a short question, i finished the setup of my first diskless pc (pentium4-256mb) but now i just wonder why unpacking GCC4.1.1 took nearly 30 minutes or even more, to apply all the patches already took 30 minutes so far and its not even finished...

any suggestions ? how do i speed up that ? thx a lot
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erik258 · Posted: Fri Feb 02, 2007 5:42 am Post subject:

your network is probably maxing out at 12.5mb/sec one way through much of that time.

of course, gcc is one of the biggest packages you're likely to install.
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wimalopaan · n00b Joined: 06 Jul 2005 Posts: 15

To all how are using unionfs for building diskless clients:

actual versions of unionfs produce various kernel-oopses.

aufs (another unionfs) is a direct replacement for unionfs, but cleanly built from scratch.

If you want to give it a try, heres an ebuild:

https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=160065

Mgiese · Veteran Joined: 23 Mar 2005 Posts: 1630 Location: indiana

is it possible to use nvidia-drivers on a diskless node ? the xorg modul "nv" is working fine, but i can not "modprobe nvidia". when installing the diskless pc i have read i should put all modules into kernel, because i am unable to load them later. but i need dri on the diskless node. i am not using grub for the diskless pc. thanks in advance
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erik258 · Posted: Mon Feb 12, 2007 8:42 am Post subject:

I don't see any reason why you wouldn't be able to load any module you wanted. Nothing cares as far as i can tell whether the root fs is on nfs or a disk, usb or anything else.
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Mgiese · Veteran Joined: 23 Mar 2005 Posts: 1630 Location: indiana

thanks for your info.. i compiled now agpgart and i2c modules into the kernel, lets see if it helps

when setting up the client i used the following guide : http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/diskless-howto.xml

conbart · n00b Joined: 14 Feb 2007 Posts: 1

Rumit · n00b Joined: 14 Feb 2007 Posts: 1

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mbar · Veteran Joined: 19 Jan 2005 Posts: 1991 Location: Poland

Sorry for digging up this thread, but I did not want to create new one

I'm planning to connect diskless node (i686 architecture, namely P3) to my x86_64 server. Gentoo diskless guide assumes that both (master and slave) architectures are the same.
Are there any quirks or incompatibilities when trying to connect i686 slave to x86_64 master?

erik258 · Posted: Thu May 31, 2007 8:44 pm Post subject:

I don't forsee any such difficulties.
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WereCatf · n00b Joined: 26 Jul 2007 Posts: 1

brot · Guru Joined: 06 Apr 2004 Posts: 322

As requested in the howto, thank you (the author

) for that howto, that is exactly what i was searching...

selig · Posted: Tue Jul 01, 2008 7:20 pm Post subject:

Nice... thanks a lot for the quick (not counting compile time but hey, it's Gentoo

) & easy diskless setup. The only glitch I've run into is that my "client does not accept options" so I had to issue the commands in pxegrub manually, it does not display a menu. But since I am using this as a rescue solution (so far it looks like at least the partition table got wiped out, along with GRUB - maybe more) for my laptop which has not got a CD-drive, it is not a problem.