This penguin walks on a bed of blue screens of death!

[ME]

On Thu, 4 Oct 2001, Lincoln Peters wrote:
> That is, it works pretty well for me, because I know what I'm doing.  I 
> couldn't run GNOME or KDE on any of the workstations because they only have 
> 64MB of memory (aack!) and it is impossible to set up any sort of swap 
> device when netbooting.

This is not entirely true, but the alternatives are scary depending upon
your resources:

If you have a netboot system that has a local physicaly HD that is
recognized by the OS, then you can use that.

If there is a disk, but they dont want you to format it or partition a
swap, *and* it is a filesystem that linux recognizes and can do write
access without serious risk (FAT32 not NTFS for example), then you can
mount the local disk on a separate tree, then verify it has at least the
amount of space you want to use as swap, and then use dd to write out that
size from /ev/zero, then losetup it to a loopback device, and then swapon
the loopback device. Blammo! Swap!  (scary, no?)

You want even more scary? Ok then! You asked for it!

Set up the server to offer one quota (user) controlled NFS export by
username (host) which maps to an /etc/hosts name for each IP based host
and also is listed in the nebooted /etc/hosts file, and then have each
client locally mount from the server their own special rw NFS mount (quota
limited) with IP restrictions for only their IP address to rw, and then
when it is mounted somewhere, do the same as above with dd, and losetup
the file with the loopback interface to a /dev/loopX device, and then
swapon that /dev and do swap space over NFS over the net with a loopback
file. (Ewwwwwww!) I told you it was scary. heh heh ]:>

Want yet another one that is almost stupid (an appears to be stupid at
first glance): enable a ramdisk of set size, mount it, dd a file in that
ram disk, losetup to dev, swapon the dev (ick!) At first it looks like you
are robbing peter to pay Paul, and this is true. It also seems like a bad
idea, and is mostly a bad idea, but even having a swap of 1-4Mb helps
quite a bit as the kernel does some things with unused libs in memory as
it starts to use swap. No swap would mean you run out of memory for these,
and bad things happen when you run out of memory. (Did I scare you yet?)
There may also be faster ways of doing this than using a ramdisk as a
mounted filesystem as /dev/ramX may be mountable as a swap directly. (not
sure, but would rmeove some layers of abstraction.)

OK, I am done being scary. No, this is how I normally look. OK, I have not
got much slee lately. Lets move on.

> Even worse, the "Programs" section of the menu is empty!  I can't see any 
> way that anyone besides myself would feel comfortable starting programs 
> using an XTerm!  I guess I'm somewhat spoiled because Ximian GNOME runs on 
> my home computer (it has 256MB of memory), so I have no experience with 
> setting up FVWM2 or any other session manager besides KDE.  Can anyone clue 
> me in on how configure it?

"There is a file..." that contains all of the config stuff for the window
manager. Locations vary from distro to distro. When you figure out the
format of the file, you can add your own stuff to the window manager and
the desktop, program listings etc.

For my debian system /etc/X11/fvwm* each have their own config files that
do their own thing. I used fvwm(1) a long time ago, and it was fun to
customize. fvwm2 and fvwm95 are a little more complex, but they can be
configured much the same way with newer and extra features in their
respective config files. Also, users may have their own extensions to the
window manager display in their own directory with fvwm2/fvwm95, but I
dont think that was a part of fvwm(1).

> A few other minor issues exist, but I want to have _something_ that is 
> actually usable for ordinary people before I tackle them.  If this seems 
> daunting right now, I can't imagine what it'll be like when I try to port 
> this to the iMacs!

Tricky as you will need a whole new binary package/suite to send to them
compiled for the 680x0 or PPC (probably PPC). Netboot imacs with MacOS is
an alternative, but it is heavily server biased and should really have
high speed drives on the server + high speed netwrks for anythign over 10
stations.

> (Some of you may remember that I was originally trying to use the server's 
> root filesystem as the workstations' root filesystem.  When I tried that, I 
> found that the necessary changes in the initscripts were so extensive and so 
> weird that I finally said to myself, "Ah, ***** it," and got the third 
> harddrive for the workstations' root filesystem.)

Yes, but if this is IDE and is not on its own IDE/ATA interface, you may
notice some client based performance issues with speed. Even ATA100 is no
match for good SCSI-3 style 160MB/s LVD controllers with matching
drives. RAID can help (depending).

> Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com/intl.asp

And what if I dont want to get my own copy of MS INternet
explorer. Huh? May as well say, "Come get your free nuclear waste! Free
biohazard baggie with random hospital trash included for free!

-ME

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     Systems Department Operating Systems Analyst for the SSU Library