gene@vis.toronto.edu (Eugene Amdur) (10/23/90)
We've got 4 diskless 4D/20's which we want to boot from a 4D/340VGX server. Here's what I would like to do: create a /export partition and in it put: 1. swap directory with a swap file for each 4D/20 2. root directory with all executables pointing to /server/root executables where /server/root is the servers "/" mounted via nfs. Note also that I'd like to have only one root directory for all of the diskless clients (as we do with our Sun diskless clients). This means that all diskless clients would have exactly the same root partition including the exact same kernel file. 3. private directory with subdirectories for each client. Each of the clients directories contains directories "tmp", "dev", and "etc". tmp and dev would be used for the obvious things. etc would be used for those files with are particular to each client. An example clarifies how 2 and 3 are used. Consider the /etc/hosts file. For our diskless clients /etc/hosts would be a link to /server/root/etc/hosts because all machines can share the same hosts file. However each machine must have its own /etc/mtab. Thus /etc/mtab for the diskless clients would be a link to /private/etc/mtab. And each machine with hostname <hostname> would mount, via nfs, /export/private/<hostname> as /private. The question I have is has anyone done this kind of thing? Can 4 diskless clients share the same root as is done with Suns? Are there any gotchas that I should be aware of? Are there any useful hints and suggestions out there? --gene gene@vis.toronto.edu or ..!{uunet, pyramid, watmath, ubc-cs}!utai!gene