On Mon, Jul 07, 2003 at 10:45:47AM +0200, Dick Kniep wrote:
> 1. We would like to use Coda instead of NFS to boot from. Is that
> possible? (I doubt that, because Venus is a standard application, which
> should be loaded BEFORE the system has started....)

Considering that you'll need a local disk for the Coda client cache
anyways, one way would be to install a minimal boot/root setup on each
client and keep most of the disk available for the cache.

Another solution would be to have the venus binary in the initrd image
that is downloaded along with the kernel. But you still need to somehow
set up the local disk to be used as a Coda cache. And I'm not really
sure how you want to deal with persistence across reboots.

It is possible to run venus with VM instead of RVM and place the local
cache on a tmpfs filesystem. I used that on an iPaq to minimize writing
to flash, but as it provides no persistency it will lose all not yet
reintegrated changes across a crash or reboot.

> 2. If NOT possible, can we mount a Coda partition thru NFS? 
> 
> If the second is also not possible, are there any alternatives?

It is possible, I used the userspace nfsd before, but never tried the
knfsd. NFS doesn't like to export a 'network filesystem', possibly to
avoid recursively exporting itself, and needs a special option like
--reexport or something.

Jan