[syslinux] Looking for ways to save space - AKA how to boot multiple machines from the same root

[Marc Tousignant]

I have several machines, same hardware and config, but one tiny little
change.. the hostname. Each one of these diskless machines needs its own
hostname.

Presently my pxelinux.cfg is setup like:

prompt 1

default Gentoo

timeout 10

 

label Gentoo

kernel boot/kernel-3.16.5-gentoo

APPEND root=/dev/nfs rw ip=dhcp
nfsroot=192.168.1.10:/RAID/diskless/XXXXX-mythtv-0.27-fixes,tcp,rsize=131072
,wsize=131072,nfsvers=3

Where the XXXXX is the hostname. Because I have 3 of these machines I am
using up 3 times the disk space.

I am wondering if there is a way all 3 of them can run from the same
nfsroot, but somehow have different hostnames/machine-ids.

Presently the hostname comes from /RAID/diskless/XXXXX
-mythtv-0.27-fixes/etc/conf.d/hostname and the machine-id from
/RAID/diskless/XXXXX -mythtv-0.27-fixes/etc/machine-id and these are the
only 2 differing files from machine to machine.

 

Marc