karen@umbc3.UMBC.EDU (Karen Petraska-Veum) (01/04/91)
Thanks to everyone who responded to my posting from a few weeks ago regarding having both the diskless client server and the diskless clients sharing the same /usr instead of having the clients use /dlenv0/rootn.mips/usr. I got more responses than I could respond to personally, both via mail and postings. The consensus was that although that configuration is NOT supported by DEC, everyone is doing it and it works fine. The cautions were that I would need to have /var on the server be a separate partition and dms might break. So, I installed the server completely (and made /var a separate partition), and then installed the client environment completely. I created the clients (I won't be adding or deleting any clients, so I don't care if this breaks dms) and made sure that they would boot, etc. Then, I removed /dlenv0/root0.mips/usr and changed the client fstabs to mount /usr@server rather than /dlenv0/root0.mips/usr@server. My setup works fine. dlenv0 without the usr tree is only about 8Meg. I don't know if I'll ever need it or not, but I left it there anyway. The only problem I ran into is that the clients when booting want to load /dlenv0/root0.mips/usr/mdec/netload. I had to restore that file. Its the same as /usr/mdec/netload, so a link could probably be made to that effect. Thanks to all who took the time to respond. i appreciate all the input. Karen Petraska, Systems University of Maryland Baltimore County karen@umbc3.umbc.edu