[lug] When is the Next Install Fest? How about a Disaster Recover Fest?

[Siegfried Heintze]

I had so much fun at the last install fest I can hardly wait for the next
one! I think Crawford said there was going to be another one sometime in
February. Are there any details yet?

Do install fests ever have a theme? After our extensive discussion on
disaster recover on the BLUG mailing list here are some thoughts I have for
a theme for the install fest:

(My assumption about disaster recovery is that you don't find it feasible to
rebuild your boot disk from scratch and you need to either perform a
diskless boot or a boot from a CD/DVD from which you could restore your boot
disk. Is this a reasonable assumption?)


Learn how to do (and configure our machines/network cards for) diskless
boots and subsequent use of rdiff/rbackup from 
    (1) A hacked Linksys a NSLU2 NAS server (they are only $100 -- anyone
know how to hack them so they serve NFS instead of CIFS?)
    (2) A USB disk on a friend's machine accessible via the internet (anyone
want to volunteer a disk and an perm IP address?)
    (3) A service that allows diskless boots over the public internet (is
there such a thing?)
    (4) A mondo/mindo rescue CD.

I've never done any of these and I would like to learn how to do them all.

>From the discussions on BLUG, I'm still not clear as to whether it is
feasible to do a diskless boot over the public internet. Someone said it was
feasible and someone else said it wasn't. I have not had a chance to
research it myself yet. I'm, of course, assuming it is feasible and would be
something we could set up for such an install fest. Maybe some hosting
service would want to facilitate this in return for the exposure? If it is
not feasible, maybe there are some other alternatives you could suggest?

Thanks,
Siegfried