Diskless clients

[Timo Lehtinen]

In article <26825A08.22201 at orion.oac.uci.edu> iglesias at orion.oac.uci.edu (Mike Iglesias) writes:
> ... From reading the "Guide to Diskless Management Services", it looks 
> like the server has to have room for 2 copies of /usr - on for itself and 
> one for the client(s).  Is that true?  It seems like a real waste of disk 
> space to have to do that if it is.  

The DEC supported way and the way dms.8 sets things up is to have a separate
/usr for the client(s). However, it's possible to customize the environment 
after running dms and make the client mount the server's /usr. Note that
then the server's "var"-area will have to be a separate file system and 
not a directory under /usr. "/usr/var" should be link to /var. /etc/exports
should only allow the clients to mount the server's /usr as read only.
This should be sufficient as the clients have their own /var's to write to.

After all isn't this exactly the idea behind /var and all those soft links 
under /usr - to allow more than one system to share the same /usr ?  ULTRIX
has had the var-concept since ~V2.0 but for some reason dms.8 doesn't know
about it yet. Oh well, it's not that bad as the customization is pretty
straight forward anyway. It would be nice to see it supported though.

Timo

-- 
Timo Lehtinen
Stream Technologies Inc.
Helsinki, Finland