Diskless: Howto create a root-disk image

I have a simple 2-PC LAN at home. I want to make one of them boot from
the other over the network. I am trying this out because I plan to
write some basic provisioning and maintenance routines for hardware
which can be run on individual server over the network without booting
them with their Disk OS.

I have come across enough HOWTOs over the internet describing how to
setup DHCP on the boot server or how to configure NFS share to share
the root-disk image. What I cannot make out however is how to create a
root disk image which can be used by the diskless PC as a read-only
disk source of OS files and utilities.

I tried installing RedHat Enterprise Linux 4.3 for this purpose using
"--root <netboot_root>" switch on rpm. But it did not work out. There
seemed to be too many cyclic dependencies between packages and even
when the packages did get installed, they threw %post(...) errors, and
sometimes failed with %pre errors. Not sure where I am going wrong. I
am really looking for a standard HOWTO or manual which describes
setting up such a root-disk image.

I know that the technique of doing this could vary from one OS to
another but any OS would do if it gives me an idea. I prefer specific
tips on how to do it for RHEL.

Please help.

Cheers,
Andy


P.S. The specs of the two PCs
-----------------------------------
Boot server: PIII 733 MHz w/ 133 MHz FSB, 512 Megs SDRAM @133MHz, 40
Gigs hard drive - Linux on (hd0,1). Dual boots to FreeBSD 6.1 and RHEL
4u3.

Client: PIV 2.4 GHz, 512 MB DDR SDRAM, 40 Gigs hard drive - Linux on
(hd0, 1). Dual boots to Win2k AS and Fedora Core 2.

Connected via a small 5-port switch using 100T network cables.

.

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