Hi, Sorry if I'm coming into this late, I've been away from the list for a while and blew away the 3k messages I hadn't read so only caught the last post of this thread....
I've been working on an NFS root installer, which starts off essentially diskless so it can repartition the harddrive(s). One gotcha I found is that strange things can happen if /dev isn't writable by root (by default nfs exports are root squashed so local root=nobody on the NFS volume). I worked around this by using a 2.4.x kernel with devfs, so that each client has it's own writable devices without any possibility of conflict with each other. Traditionaly I think a compressed ramdisk is loaded off the boot floppy and mounted on /dev (but I've not done this). The advantage of the devfs system is that you can just dump raw kernels to floppy without mucking with lilo or syslinux, down side is that running 2.4.x is slightly more adventuresome than stock stable (though see http://www.debian.org/News/2001/20010415 for how to run 2.4.x with an otherwise stable system). I'd be happy to go into more detail, but I really missed the question :) HTH, -Jon
