Thinking of using Warewulf as a base for some of our diskless work
By joe
- 2 minutes read - 225 wordsI’ve been thinking about this for a while. We have a good diskless system, but I’ve always liked the nano-ramdisk version of the OS. Create a base distro with JEOS (just enough OS) to boot, and mount all the other bits you need. Not that there is anything wrong with what we are doing now, its just that I really like that capability. Especially if we could keep the ramdisk compressed. Right now, Tiburon works well. I am thinking of the future where I don’t have to worry about coding everything myself, and there’s good kit that Greg K cooked up. Tiburon can boot pretty much anything that is PXE bootable. I’ve updated motherboard BIOS with it, run diagnostics CDs, etc. I’m a pretty firm adherent to the stateless install philosophy … will still do stateful where needed, but stateless makes admin pretty much painless. Our clusters do both … Tiburon again … Really, Tiburon can boot anything that you can PXE boot with a “kernel”, “initrd” and “boot options”. Its scary good. We can have clusters with easily selectable mixtures of OSes, changed at next reboot according to whatever the user needs. We do that part very well. Its the building of the diskless environments that is still somewhat manual for each OS. And Warewulf excels at that. Which is why I am interested.