Re: two minor problems with diskless RHEL 3beta

On Wed, 2003-10-01 at 05:59, Alois Treindl wrote:
> After setting up two clients successfully (one still fails to complete 
> the boot), I have two remaining problems with diskless setup via 
> redhat-config-netboot
> 
> a) how to configure swap space for the client (currently, they come up 
> with no swap). Please point me to the documentation

swap and diskless is a tricky situation at best. In the past you needed
to compile a static kernel for the clients that had patches for swap
over NFS or swap over network socket. Now the last time I played with
this...  it worked for small lans, but did not scale well. However this
was 2.2.x patches. 

The weirdest setup I saw was that each diskless client had 2 network
cards.. the first did NFS mounts and outbound traffic. THe second did
nfs mounts of a set of diskimages that were mounted via loopback as
swapfiles. I think of it as a mad scientists experiment gone horribly
bad.  In most cases, we have found that if you have to swap over the
ethernet you are going to see 2-5 times worse degredation of services
than if you were to just swap. It was cheaper to buy more memory or put
a 500 mb IDE hard-drive off of e-bay as being the internal swap drive
than to try and swap over the ethernet.

[In some cases where we cant have internal drives at all and need to
swap, we have gone to either fibre channel disk-drives or that strange 2
network card swap routine.] 

> 
> b) There is a problem with the domain names, and in consequence with the 
> <diskless>/snapshot/<domain> directories.
> 
> I setup a client under the domain name  a.b.com  but when it boots, it 
> sees itself as a.b.com.  (note the dot at the end!) and correspondingly,
> creates a duplicate snapshot directory with that name snapshot/a.b.com./
> 
> What can the cause of that be? Could it have to do with dhcp configuration?
> 
> 

Hmmm something is using an absolute domain name somewhere. . is the root
of all DNS systems and thus the real host name is

www.yahoo.com.
versus 
www.yahoo.com

I have seen this show up in certain perl code or dns setups but my brain
is too foggy at this time to figure it out.

> 
> 
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