Re: [gentoo-user] Re: NFS Boot

[Alan McKinnon]

On Saturday 16 January 2010 22:14:00 walt wrote:
> On 01/16/2010 08:32 AM, Mikie wrote:
> > Hello,
> >
> > I am converting an Ubuntu 9.10 to NFS boot by coping files to the NFS
> > root.
> >
> > My question is:
> >
> > Would it be better to create a local hard drive swap and file system for
> > certain root dir?
> >
> > Should Tmp  be local rather than on the NFS root?
>
> I'm no expert on the subject, but I'm interested in the answer too.
> I'm thinking it may depend on your reason for wanting to boot from NFS.
>
> One big reason for network booting is for diskless workstations, but
> it seems you plan to keep the existing drive(s) in that machine?
>
> In that case I would choose to make the NFS boot fs read-only and put
> any writeable fs on the local disk -- but again that would depend on
> your reasons for making the change in the first place.
>
> But I await more informed opions than mine.

The usual scenario for network booting is indeed diskless workstations - these 
usually often have a decent amount of ram, and the login sessions on them are 
short-lived (on the order of a few hours).

tmpfs is the best choice for /tmp in this case

swap may need some fiddling. By it's nature, the faster swap is the better. 
NFS tends to be either set up properly then it's fast (I have NASes runnign 
NFS that out-perform all but the fastest local disks....), or it's set up 
badly then it's very slow indeed.

One should benchmark swap on a local device (either disk or ramdisk) and 
compare it to swap over nfs and decide based on the results. I've not yet seen 
a formula that lets you predict in advance which one is likely to be better


-- 
alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com