Re: Deprecating NBD in favor of squashfs-over-NFS

Hi Nik,

thanks for the patch! Unfortunately I'm spending a lot of hours per day 
preparing ltsp19, so I won't have time to test and add new features to 
ltsp5. Hopefully ltsp19 will be in good enough shape to replace ltsp5 
before the next debian release (after buster), i.e. new features for 
ltsp5 are probably a moot point.

Especially that part of the ltsp5 codebase that handles pxelinux 
settings wasn't well designed, and I've completely rewritten in for 
ltsp19; it now uses an ipxe configuration file which supports variables.

That said, maybe some other developer will find time to test and commit 
the patch, and maybe even default to this for new ltsp5 installations...

Cheers,
Alkis


On 6/6/19 2:15 PM, Dominik George wrote:
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> Hash: SHA512
> 
> Hi,
> 
> On Fri, May 17, 2019 at 10:52:46AM +0300, Alkis Georgopoulos wrote:
>> NBD is used for the LTSP client root file system, /.
>> SSHFS is used for /home and is unrelated to this discussion.
>>
>> NBD has some issues; instability; no reconnections; can't survive server
>> reboots; difficult configuration; etc.
>>
>> In the past, NBD replaced NFS in LTSP because the squashfs image has less
>> metadata and is compressed, so it's a lot faster than an uncompressed
>> directory.
>>
>> The best of both worlds is to export the squashfs image over NFS.
>> So, the server will export /opt/ltsp/images via NFS,
>> and the clients will connect to /opt/ltsp/images/amd64.img,
>> and "loop-mount" it as their root file system.
>> To be clear: you'll still need to run `ltsp-update-image` like before.
>>
>> LTSP5 already supports this; we just haven't tried it in production a lot.
> 
> I proposed a patch for this on Launchpad, to generate boot entries for
> this and make it selectable as a boot method which I called NFSI:
> 
>   https://code.launchpad.net/~natureshadow/ltsp/+git/ltsp/+merge/368453
> 
> Cheers,
> Nik


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