Live without NFS?

[Thomas Lange]

>>>>> On Mon, 20 Oct 2003 17:22:36 +0200, Peter Wahl <Peter.Wahl at alcatel.de> said:

    > for FAI ;-).  Unfortuneately my install server has to be a
    > Windows 2000 machine (I know that's a design bug - but its not
    > my fault and I cannot change it).
Uuuuh. It don't like to do your job.
But try to tell your head that you can save much time (that's also
money) when you can use a PPC computer as install server, not a
Win.. machine. I think it's worth and there are a lot of arguments for
doing so.

    > As far as I understood the FAI documentation (and the list
    > archive), there's no way to live without NFS? I don't have an
    > NFS server on the Windows host and I'd like to avoid buying one
There's a solution. Create a kernel that does not use a NFS mounted
root file system but use a initrd instead. This initrd must contain
the whole nfsroot, so it will use more than 100 MBytes. Maybe it's
useful to remove /usr/share/doc and similar directories to save some
space. Then you could boot your PPC machine using PXE and tftp.
To get the configuration data, you can write a hook that receives the
config data via http or ftp and unpacks an archive into the ramdisk.

Hope this helps.
-- 
regards Thomas