Optimising pxeboot disk size

[Wojciech Puchar]

> on NFS server.
>
> Lot of root directories can be shared and mounted in fstab, after booting 
> process : /usr, /home...
>
> In current solution, the minimum root directories i had to keep for managing 
> to boot are :
> bin libexec sbin boot etc lib

i already did such things but with NetBSD 1.5 for my Xterminal distro.

it's simple:


mount / readonly, put everything here.

in /etc put /etc/rc consisting only

#!/bin/sh
exec /systemrc

in /systemrc put something like that:

#!/bin/sh
echo -n Mounting workstation config directory...
#get your IP or MAC address using ifconfig,grep,cut,awk,how you like
#put to to say MYIP
/sbin/mount_nfs yournfsserver:/clients/etc/MYIP /etc
echo done
exec /etc/rc



please then add:

/tmp, /var/tmp, /var/run, possibly /var/log as tmpfs in fstab

OR

mount it with per-station directory the same way as /etc



I wish it's helpful, doing this doesn't just save space but saves time - 
you have to upgrade software once.


you may like to make /etc-common directory and put most of files there, 
and symlinks in each station's /etc