[OpenAFS] afs for /

[Jeffrey Hutzelman]

On Tue, 23 Jul 2002, Dirk Heinrichs wrote:

> On Sun, 21 Jul 2002, Joerg Sommer wrote:
>
> > Hi,
> >
> > is it possible to use afs for the root directory? I see some problem with
> No.
>
> > We will boot all clients from the net and we would set up a NFS server
> > for / and afs should provide /usr, /home,... So the NFS server isn't
> > really necessary. But could we use afs for this?
> AFS not, but if the clients are Linux, they could netboot a combined
> kernel/ramdisk image, where the ramdisk should have anything needed to set
> up and mount AFS. Don't know if this will work with other client OS's,
> though.

Yes, you can do some pretty insane things.  Back in the RedHat 6.2 days,
we had an install floppy which would let you install directly out of AFS.
The first-stage installer was hacked to know how to load the AFS module
and start a cache manager in memory-cache mode (which isn't very hard).