[Techtalk] progress with debian diskless client
Maria McKinley
maria at shadlen.org
Fri Apr 10 00:20:11 UTC 2009
Chris Wilson wrote:
> Hi Maria,
>
> On Thu, 9 Apr 2009, Maria McKinley wrote:
>
>> I am slowly making progress with my cluster setup. Soooo, last we heard
>> I was having problems mounting the root nfs as read/write.
>
> That may not be a brilliant idea, as clients may unexpectedly overwrite
> each others' settings and therefore conflict with each other. Unionfs
> may help you here.
>
Each client has its own directory, so they can only screw up themselves.
I've been doing this for a while (I actually had this running in
previous kernels), and it definitely is convenient to have log files in
the usual place.
>> I decided that the problem was something about the copying of the
>> server root directories into the root directory for the client. I
>> decided to give debootstrap a try, and used that to create the root
>> directory for the client. This time when I booted, it booted up to run
>> level 2, and mounted the root directory properly. The problem, of
>> course, is that I really don't want it stopping at run level 2, and I
>> want it to have all of the same applications as the server.
>
> You can change the default runlevel by changing the "initdefault" line
> in /etc/inittab.
>
>> One obvious problem is that it doesn't include nfs-common, so I can't
>> mount the home directories.
>
> If you can start the services manually, with e.g. /etc/init.d/nfs-common
> start, then the runlevel is the problem. Otherwise, something else is
> wrong.
great trouble shooting hint, thanks. I'll give it a try later tonight.
>
>> How can I update this new directory?
>
> You can use the chroot command on the server to enter the virtual
> environment. You may need to mount /proc, /dev/pts etc. for some
> commands to work, but then you should be able to run get-selections or
> whatever other commands you want.
>
> Cheers, Chris.
Cool, thanks, that makes more sense. Hope to have more good news soon.
cheers,
maria
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