Re: tlug: NFS question

[Frank Bennett <bennett@example.com>]

Really useful responses to this: thanks to everyone.  I'll be
around with more q's no doubt, if the committee I see tomorrow
agrees that this is a good thing, and gives me a machine to work
up as the master terminal.

Rex Walters <rex@example.com> writes:

> >                                       The terminal machines will
> > run Applix and Netscape and what have you, from the disk in each
> > terminal.  Data, mail, and bootpd parameters will be stored on
> > the server.
> 
> You may want to make an install server as well -- to ensure all your
> clients are configured identically.

A lot of the machines on the network have cards in them that are
nominally capable of 100baseT, but they're not all the same, and
I'm not sure that they will all work reliably at full speed under
Linux.  Last time I checked (while setting up an NFS-root machine
as a trial), I could only get the Tulip-based cards to work at
10baseT: Donald Becker's tulip.c driver, which supports 100baseT
in the Tulip chip, wouldn't run these particular cards at any
speed.  That driver's been through a bunch of upgrades since, but
I'll be moving into 100-land with some caution.  We'll have to
wait and see what happens.

For producing the terminals, I was thinking of setting up a
dual-boot machine (Win95 and Linux), running an image of the disk
to a tape across the network, and then cloning this to the
terminals by booting them to Linux with a boot floppy and using
"dd" to lay down the image locally.  I've never used "dd" in this
way before, and I do have three questions:

  Will Microsoft's Win95 throw a temper tantrum on the target
  machine if the hardware does not match that anticipated by
  the disk image?

and

  Will this work if the capacity of the target disk is larger
  than that from which the image was taken -- can I come along
  later and define the remaining space as an additional partition
  or partitions?

and the inevitable

  Is there a better way?

If the answers are not "no, yes, no", is there a more clever way
to perform the initial installation across the network?  I've no
doubt I can figure out a way of getting this done, but since any
s**t's going to hit me before it even gets to the fan, I'd like
to assure that the overhead on the Frank is kept as low as
possible.

Cheers,
-- 
-x80
Frank G Bennett, Jr         @@
Faculty of Law, Nagoya Univ () email: bennett@example.com
Tel: +81[(0)52]789-2239     () WWW:   http://rumple.soas.ac.uk/~bennett/
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