> > Hi,
> >
> > I posted this once, but somehow it got lost, and Red Hat Support doesn't
> > answer, does probably not think this qualifies as a basic installation
> > question ...
> >
> > I want to do a rather "strange" installation - install everything, but
> > don't include /usr/ (/usr/ would be provided by NFS).
> >
> > However, there's a problem here: rpm supports --excludepath [path]. But
> > unlike the --excludedocs option it cannot be put in the rpm macros file
> > (at least I didn't manage and I didn't find any documentation
> > indicating something else ...).
>
> Since almost everything lives in /usr, don't use rpm at all.
>
> Create a basic system that you can tarball, and untar it onto the target
> machines. All maintenance is done on the host, the system that serves the
> files.
>
> You can go further, and mount everything by NFS - I set up a boot disk
> here that would run Linux on any machine on my network. I could have spent
> some money and bought boot roms; then I'd not have needed the floppy.
>
> The beowulf and netboot howtos are good starting-points. I used DHCP do
> issue IP addresses; the kernel can be configured to issue a bootp request.
>
> You need some directories particular to each machine: /var (stuff it
> writes on), /etc (host-specific configurations).
Well, I did all that before on other systems.
But I'm talking of hundreds of computers with
particular needs (ie. /etc and /var should be read-write) and which I
don't want to maintain personally (ie. their read-write stuff should
not be on my NFS Server) and which even an idiot should be able to
install (ie. use the standard Red Hat Installation).
The concept should be okay as I've done quite a lot of diskless (or
nearly diskless) systems (ie. autorpm keeps the RPMs in sync, other files
are in sync using rsync, automated setup using kickstart).
However, it seems I cannot do it that way ... :(
_______________________________________
Michael Redinger
Computer Centre University of Innsbruck
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