Announce - Silentcat diskless NBD boot for FC3

[Andy Green]

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Hi -

NFS diskless booting is well established for Linux and works reasonably
well, if a little slowly.

However Linux also supports a "Network Block Device", in Redhat
modularized as nbd.ko, which is capable to make a remotely served file
appear as a local block device, eg, /dev/nda.  You can mount this device
as if it was a regular local HDD.  It operates very quickly over the
network and is perfectly capable to replace a local Hard Drive.  (In
fact depending on the server spec, it can operate faster than a local HDD).

The silentcat project consists of instructions on setting up PXELINUX,
DHCP and TFTP, some usermode code and scripts to generate a 1GB ext3
filesystem file on a Linux server, and export this using the NBD
protocol such that a diskless client PC can boot from the server over
the network and have the remote filesystem file exported over NBD come
up as the root filesystem on the client machine.

The scripts also install a minimal runlevel 3 Fedora Core 3 distro into
the remote filesystem by auto-downloading a minimal set of FC3 RPMs and
installing them into the filesystem.  Yum and RPM are included in this
minimal set, so once you boot your client from this filesystem you can
pull in any other RPMs you need (x.org. KDE, samba, etc) conveniently
using yum.  The base, update and Dag repos are configured for use with yum.

Multiple clients are supported from a single server, each directed to
its own filesystem based on client PC MAC address.

~From the server point of view, exporting NBD filesystem files is a lot
simpler, faster and more secure than NFS, particularly is circumstances
forced the use of "no root squash".

Silentcat is in use here with a diskless EPIA board that boots into KDE
and performs mplayer-based mediaplayer duties and is proving very fast
and reliable.

http://warmcat.com/silentcat has the details and scripts.  Comments welcome!

- -Andy
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