this post was submitted on 23 May 2026
647 points (98.8% liked)

Programmer Humor

31616 readers
84 users here now

Welcome to Programmer Humor!

This is a place where you can post jokes, memes, humor, etc. related to programming!

For sharing awful code theres also Programming Horror.

Rules

founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
Feyter@programming.dev
anzo@programming.dev
BurningTurtle@programming.dev
pylapp@programming.dev
647
Damn straight I tell you h'what (lemmy.ml)
submitted 1 week ago by jankforlife@lemmy.ml to c/programmer_humor@programming.dev
49 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[โ€“] KSPAtlas@sopuli.xyz 3 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Technically you could just netboot a kernel and initrd, then mount a root filesystem via the network

So you don't even need a drive in your computer

Not sure why you'd do this outside of very specific appliances but it's an option

[โ€“] FuckBigTech347@lemmygrad.ml 1 points 4 days ago

I do this for a server in my LAN. I use DHCP+TFTP to boot grub over the network via PXE, and then grub boots the Kernel with the root pointing to a NFS share:

menuentry 'GNU/Linux NFS' --class gnu-linux --class gnu --class os {
        load_video
        set gfxpayload=keep
        insmod gzio
        insmod part_msdos
        insmod part_gpt
        insmod fat
        echo    'Loading kernel ...'
        linux   <TFTP Root>/vmlinuz root=/dev/nfs ip=dhcp nfsroot=<NFS Server IP>:/export/rootfs/<Root Dir> rw loglevel=6 threadirqs
}

Doing this makes managing that installation much easier. It's just a directory that lives on the Main Server.
I don't even need to boot the other Server to update the software in it, chroot is enough. And I don't even have to worry about doing separate backups, because I already back up the Main Server's Storage regularly.