Chapter 2. Introduction

Table of Contents
Conventions used in this documentation
Your support is required.

This package comes with two programs, diskless-newimage, and diskless_newhost to simplify setting up and maintaining diskless clients.

It requires base.tgz created by createbasetgz script, and one of the diskless-image packages. As of writing this, the only diskless-image package that has been tested is diskless-image-simple (diskless-image-simple_0.3.0_all.deb).

The clients are setup to mount / as Read/Only from a shared point and mount /etc as Read/Write before executing /sbin/init.

Please see /usr/doc/diskless/TODO for a list of known bugs.

Conventions used in this documentation

Table 2-1. Abbreviated Forms

$VAR/var/lib/diskless
$USR/usr/lib/diskless
imagediris the where the imagedir (aka master image) is to be placed.
hostsdiris the data specific to all hosts is placed.
ipis the IP address of the host for the current operation.
hostdiris the data specific to an individual host is placed. this will be hostsdir/ip.

Note: if imagedir is exported read-write to the remote computer, it will boot as the master system. Please ensure you have read-only export permission if you don't want people altering it!