First off, I'd like to say I'm not the wordsmith that Larry is, so please bear with me. (Larry please feel free to get your big red pen out and make this doc a bit more user friendly
)The idea of booting off NFS was to make modifying MiniMyth a bit of a quicker process, as with the system configured this way I can make modifications to the filesystem in real time. An example of how this was useful to me was in getting mplayer working. I was able to keep running mplayer and keep adding libraries until I had all the ones I needed. To do this rebooting with cramfs would have taken ages. I have to say tho, that eventually I do intend to cramfs the finished filesystem. I think it will probably yield a more responsive system to run this way, as the frontend wont be calling for files from the server all the time.
Anyway to begin... GET EVERYTHING WORKING WITH CRAMFS
Now we can start getting things working with NFS.
CONFIGURE PXELINUX
==================
The first thing we need to do is tell PXELinux that we want to boot from somewhere else other than the cramfs system. We do this in /var/lib/tftpboot/PXEClient/pxelinux.cfg/default
My default file looks like this..
--8<-----8<----8<-----8<-----8<----8<-----8<-----8<-----8<-----
PROMPT 1
DEFAULT n
DISPLAY messages
TIMEOUT 1
label local
LOCALBOOT 0
#label linux
# KERNEL memdisk
# APPEND initrd=images/linux/network.img
#F1 images/local/help.txt
label r
KERNEL kernel
# don't use quotes on the append line
APPEND initrd=rootfs ramdisk_blocksize=4096 ramdisk=50000 root=/dev/ram0 MYTHSERVER=192.168.0.1
label n
KERNEL kernel
# don't use quotes on the append line
APPEND root=/dev/nfs nfsroot=192.168.0.1:/var/lib/mythroot,rsize=8192,wsize=8192,rw ip=dhcp MYTHSERVER=192.168.0.1
----8<-----8<-----8<-----8<-----8<-----8<-----8<-----8<-----8<---8<---
"label r" is the ram disk which is the original MiniMyth cramfs boot and "label n" is the NFS boot option.
CHANGE YOUR KERNEL
=========================
You will need a slightly different kernel to allow NFS to work.
You can get a finished one from here http://n-e-m.net/Myth/NFSBoot/bzImage.
Or you can build your own using the same patched source that the original MiniMyth uses along with this .config http://n-e-m.net/Myth/NFSBoot/.config
Copy the kernel to /var/lib/tftpboot/PXEClient/kernel
CONFIGURE NFS
=============
if you haven't got NFS setup go here http://www.mandrakeuser.org/docs/connect/cnfs.html and follow the instructions.
We need to export the MiniMyth filesystem from the server so edit your /etc/exports to include an extra line as follows. (if /etc/exports doesn't exist then create it, and you may need to start up the nfs services afterwards)
/var/lib/mythroot 192.168.0.6(rw,no_root_squash)
save the exports file and make sure you run
exportfs -ra
to update the shared directories.
Extracting the MiniMyth filesystem
==================================
Download the Bzipped MiniMyth file system from Larrys web site .. currently this is here http://linpvr.org/rel-0.1/minimyth-0.1.tar.bz2
unzip this in your home dir
tar -jvxf minimyth-0.1.tar.bz2
Now CD to /var/lib and make the mythroot directory.
cd into the mythroot dir and copy the MiniMyth filesystem in
cp -R ~/minimyth-0.1/* .
Editing MiniMyth for NFS
========================
Okay, hopefully your with me so far.
cd into your new file systems etc dir which is here /var/lib/mythroot/etc
Edit the fstab file to mount the NFS filesystem, adding this line..
192.168.0.1:/var/lib/mythroot / nfs rw,hard,intr 0 0
Change the IP address to match where you shared the filesystem from.
Now edit the RC script and make the following changes. Comment out the call to the network.script, and optionally remount the filesystem.rw so you can make changes on the host system.
My rc script looks like this ..
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#!/bin/sh
mount -o remount,rw /
#/etc/network.script
export PATH=/usr/X11R6/bin:/usr/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin/:/bin:/usr/X11R6/lib:/usr/local/bin
/sbin/devfsd /dev
/bin/mount -t tmpfs -o size=512K tmpfs /var
/bin/mount -t tmpfs -o size=512K tmpfs /tmp
/bin/mkdir /var/lock
/bin/mkdir /var/log
/bin/mkdir /var/run
/bin/mkdir /var/root
/bin/mount -av
/etc/loadmods.script
/etc/software.script
/etc/lirc.script
xinit
--8<-----8<----8<-----8<-----8<----8<-----8<-----8<-----8<-----
I have written all of this from memory so I'm sure I missed something, but let assume I didn't
.Boot your EPIA and you should now be booting from and using your NFS filesystem.
Please let me know if you find any problems or omissions with/from this HOWTO.
Have fun,
Regards,
Darren[/url]