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Introduction to Linux - A Hands on Guide
This guide was created as an overview of the Linux Operating System, geared toward new users as an exploration tour and getting started guide, with exercises at the end of each chapter.
For more advanced trainees it can be a desktop reference, and a collection of the base knowledge needed to proceed with system and network administration. This book contains many real life examples derived from the author's experience as a Linux system and network administrator, trainer and consultant. They hope these examples will help you to get a better understanding of the Linux system and that you feel encouraged to try out things on your own.
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RAMBOOT is an initrd hack that loads the entire OS partition in RAM, making it run like an extremely fast SSD, at the expense of perhaps 1.5+GB of RAM.
Previously I described RAMBOOT using a compressed OS tarball. This is good for boot time, but it takes time to create a new tarball. This new How-To takes a different approach - simply copying an entire directory tree using piped tar commands (cp won't work because of the limited initrd environment). This increases boot time, but allows...
NFS-RAMBOOT adapts my RAMBOOT hack to NFS root (PXE or not). On boot, it extracts an OS tarball from an nfs share into local RAM (recommended 3+GB of RAM). The result is like a very fast SSD.
Why do this? Compared to RAMBOOT, loading (and saving) the OS tarball over gigabit ethernet can be faster than a local hard drive or USB drive, if the file server has an SSD or a faster hard drive (compare 3.5" drives to 2.5" laptop drives, for example). Also, having the OS tarballs...
Previously, I described how to use one computer's RAM as an SSD (OS drive) for another computer. Here, I describe how to use one computer's RAM as SWAP for another computer. Bear in mind that even a RAM disk over gigabit ethernet isn't going to be as fast as a local SSD, but it's still faster and much more responsive than a local spinning hard drive.
This technique of using another computer's RAM as SWAP is a great way to augment RAMboot, as described here:
There are plenty of other diskless how-to sites out there, but I decided to post this one so it would fit in with my other similarly themed blog posts. Also, most other how-to's are a bit more complicated. This one is a simplistic setup for just one client workstation. You'd have to modify things in one way or another to handle multiple clients.
You can combine this How-To with my How-To for serving up tmpfs nfsroot on the server side. This could be useful if you want to make use...
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