(Cc: list for posterity)

Nice, thanks!

I should have waited to send the message - I made a /init that exec's
/sbin/init (maybe I can just symlink them?), removed any auto lines from
/etc/fstab, and it worked like a charm.

This is flippin' sweet. I can netboot into a re-imager, netboot into a
rescue system, netboot into a BIOS updater (if I dare), netboot into a
security thingie, or netboot a diskless webhead, just by changing a symlink
and rebooting the target system (with IPMI if necessary).

Thanks for the pointer to ThinStation, by the way, that looks really
instructional, a cool project, and maybe useful at home.

Cheers,
Peter

On Mon, Oct 20, 2008 at 6:01 PM, Stanley Brinkerhoff <stan@vtwireless.com>wrote:

> I use ThinStation on ~50 thin client PC's which operates as you describe.
>
> Stan
>
>
> On Mon, Oct 20, 2008 at 8:49 PM, Peter Abrahamsen <rainhead@gmail.com>wrote:
>
>> Hi all,
>>
>> I got the crazy idea to boot my servers purely from netboot with their
>> root filesystems being initramfs archives coming from tftp on pxeboot.
>>
>> Is this reasonable? I tried just passing a cpio of my desired root
>> partition as the initrd option, but it ended up using my hdd as root, I
>> think because my initramfs didn't have a file at /init. Everyone else seems
>> to just use their initramfs in order to boot something else, like nfs, but
>> I've got plenty of RAM and don't really want to introduce the additional
>> complexity and latency of NFS.
>>
>> Anyone done anything like that?
>>
>> Thanks,
>> Peter
>>
>
>