Yet another idea for a nfsroot pool …

Ok, seems I finally understood the magic around linux initrd.gz files. Basically, it provides a minimal rootfs with an optional /linuxrc executable. Using something like busybox (e.g. via ln -s /bin/busybox /bin/ash) that can even be a shell script. It should be possible to mount the nfsroot ro, create a tmpfs for unionfs changes and …

Short update …

Semester has started, and I am currently busy getting my stuff together for that. Luckily, the student computer pool is finally quite usable (only after I found one of those „one character bugs“ in the nfs exports file of our /home server). This semester will be mainly about semantic web with me also visiting XML …

Signing off to the weekend

The last two weeks I did not post an update on the status of my work, as the computer pool has to be ready for student impact in about a week. I was planning to replicate the student passwords from our gforge server into a Samba PDC, as well as into Linux passwd files, phpbb …

Annoying bugs are …

those which take you four hours to find them and 1 minute to fix them (remembering this post). Today I was searching the web for information on how to configure a simple boot menu with PXELinux. Our setup was woking nice when we had only one entry for the diskless Gentoo installation in the config …

Getting things done …

Xen domains working Yesterday, I managed to move our GForge server into the DMZ as a Xen domain. The CoObRA Repositories are also hosted in a Xen domain, although they might consume way more RAM than the currently assigned 256 MB … I have to admit that the firewall of the university is still blocking …