What did I use?

Well, I tried out almost everything. Everything was built on top of my Debian-unstable, however. The kernel was non-Debian; I got that from the usual suspect. Yours can be found at http://www.kernel.org/mirrors/.

Revisions I tried were 2.2.19, 2.4.5 and 2.4.9. None worked perfectly. I won't comment much on 2.2.19, as I don't think I even got it to mount /.

For exporting files over the network, I used the Universal NFS Server 2.2beta47, which came with Debian. I also used Samba 2.2.1a, but only for exporting some legacy FAT partitions which I have been too lazy to convert over to Reiserfs.

For network swapping, I tried enbd-2.4.26 (ftp://oboe.it.uc3m.es/pub/Programs/nbd-2.4.26.tgz) by Peter Breuer as well as the nbd code that came with linux-2.4.9 and the nfs-swapping-patch for 2.4.5 from http://www.instmath.rwth-aachen.de/ heine/nfs-swap/ by Claus-Justus Heine.

I used Pavel Macheks nbd code, which is included in stock Linux kernels and should therefore be the ideal solution for swapping over the network. It turned out not to be, as I couldn't even get the server to run stable. Only enbd and the nfs-swap-patch yielded any usable results.

For booting, the tftpd 0.17-5 package from Debian/unstable was used. The bootp-server was also stock Debian, version 2.4.3-6.