Linux Live Distro for NFS and hardware compatibility

What do people recon is the best live cd distro for sharing local drives and basically acting as a super light file server. Ideally easy to modify, just to include some custom software at boot. No gui or anything fussy, just a nice happy file and network box?

Thanks.

Ben

 

freenas or naslite, i used naslite for months before going to server2k3

 

Thanks, iv looked at freenas before but it doesn't do what i realy want, its a bit tricky to explain really, basically if you think of it as a very temporary file server. So basically if there is a pc i need to get stuff from and its dead or dieing then i can boot it from whatever the cd is and just grab the files from the local drives.
That isnt' my intended use but its the same as really!!
I am just looking at using damn small which looks reasonably good, especially as it will boot on really low spec machines. Just need to find some resources to modify the iso to auto mount the local drives etc etc...

 

aah knoppix then, that's live and can deal with allsort

 

you could also try dsl (damn small linux) or puppy linux

 

Thanks, i was playing about with both knoppix and dsl, however i cant find how to customise that damn "KNOPPIX" file sitting there on the iso grinning at me! And i presume that would be exactly how i need to add my /etc/exorts as both of them have that read only when running. Oh and to enable nfs at boot and the like as well.

Anyone know how to view the file system inside "KNOPPIX" thanks,

Ben

 

I guess it's like any kernel. so do

Code:

 less /usr/src/linux/.config | grep -i nfs

and that will give you the needed info I guess

 

But once i have recompiled how do i make it a live cd? If i do that it will only try and rebuild the knoppix or dsl kernel on to a read only cd wont it?

Ben

 

Yes, but if it boots, it boots from the cd (using the kernel), and then it creates the RAMDrive for hosting the read/writes on, doesn't it?

 

When i try to edit most sys files i get a ro error. I will try again tho, but i have found a couple of resources on remastering it, so ill do it that way.

Thanks,

Ben

 

Can you post the resources? In case someone else might need the info? (and I'm curious about it too )

 

I found it on the knoppix wiki, big long page of it. I cant rembmer the address though. And now im on a different machine. erm....
But i found it again

http://www.knoppix.net/wiki/Knoppix_Remastering_Howto

voila, there are different language versions available if you run a quick search.

Ben

 

Is this when trying to edit FAT32 and NTFS partitions?
If so, make sure that you have mounted as rw (read/write) and not ro (read only).
Or, you might need to su to root. The default password for the root user in knoppix is blank (or knoppix).

 

It was running from the live CD so it was CDFS so ro

Ben

 

I also want to note, altough NTFS has socalled write support... It's still very very very basic... Only overwrite files that exist... No new creation and stuff... Reading is fine tough

 

Thanks, i think its a good point to put here about NTFS.
However, thats not going to bother me, does anyone have any experience of using a shell script to run fdisk to totally wipe all the drives in a machine then format them all ext? If not, no problem, i was just having a little problem doig fdisk with a shell script.

 

a script? not really "fdisk <dev>" and then delete all partitions... but if you want a more visual, try "cfdisk"

And to "format" them, "mke2fs" is your weapon of choice to make ext2, and "mke2fs -j" for the 3 variant, but that you probably knew

 

As far as NTFS write support goes;
You can change the contents of a file, but not its size.
Each file has to remain the same exact length. No adding or deleting characters without making up for it on a 1:1 ratio.
Also, with freenas I found that ntfs support to be terrible! It could only read the root dir of the ntfs file system, but not access any directories within (showed up as zero length files) and it could not read normal files (jpg and txt for example). I got an error that says it could not read the file. Much like when you pull out a USB key and try to save the word doc you are working on.

 

im not bothered about it being graphical at all, so i dont need cfdisk, what i needed was to be able to wipe the entire drive, automatically when booting from the live cd. So i will modify the live disk to run the script at boot, but it doesnt look like there is an automated way to totally kill a disk,

Ben

 

You might still be able to do this.
Google for "how to make a live linux CD". I found an article that tells you how to install linux, and tehn configure it so you can just burn it to a CD and boto from there. Then, just write a script that utilizes the cfdisk command when it boots up.

Why do you want it to wipe the disk everytime the PC starts?