[Ltsp-discuss] diskless node project: advice?

[De C. <de...@uc...>]

It's Newbie Question Time!

I'm thinking of making my firewall (home network, ADSL)
diskless.  It is a linux pentium box running ipchains.
It does nothing else.  I asked myself why I was spending
electricity dollars on a small, aging disk drive inside
this machine when I could run it diskless and use space
on a nearby, inside-the-wall, more powerful disk server.

Have just about convinced myself that this is a good thing
to do.  Now I am searching for tools to make it easy and
quick :-)

LTSP suite looks interesting, but I am concerned that my
app is not a good fit and perhaps I will have to hack on
the default LTSP stuff for many hours... The significant
differences of course are:

1) 	this is an unique node and wants to mount a
	/var partition rw, not ro, because it requires 
	persistent logging... rest of root can be ro,
	I guess

2) 	the app to be run is not an x server, but ipchains

I already have a fairly complete copy of the firewall's
disk on the server.  I am guessing that the next steps
would be

1. replace the original 6.2 kernel with a "tulip" kernel
   from LTSP... OR... use mknbi-linux to turn the original
   kernel into an ethernet-bootable image (?)  How does
   mknbi-linux know which enet card (i.e. ne2000) to
   configure?

2. hack around in the LTSP config files for a while to
   make the diskless host not an x terminal but a firewall
   (this is the scary part -- will I be trying to undo 
   just a part of the LTSP configuration, or almost all of
   it?  how messy will this get?  has anyone else done 
   this?)

lastly, for reasons that I really don't want to get in here,
the firewall supports a parallel printer.  so this function
would have to be preserved.  given its own nfs-mounted /var
and therefore spool area, I don't foresee a problem...

is this an insane idea?  if so, why?  any advice?

de

.............................................................................
:De Clarke, Software Engineer                     UCO/Lick Observatory, UCSC:
:Mail: de...@uc... |                                                     :
:Web: www.ucolick.org |             Don't Fear the Penguins                 :