Date: Sun, 06 Aug 2006 12:52:02 -0700 From: Helmut Hissen <helmut@zeebar.com> To: James Mansion <james@wgold.demon.co.uk> Cc: freebsd-small@freebsd.org Subject: Re: diskless (or rather, readonly) Message-ID: <44D64862.1010701@zeebar.com> In-Reply-To: <HCEPKPMCAJLDGJIBCLGHEEMIFNAA.james@wgold.demon.co.uk> References: <HCEPKPMCAJLDGJIBCLGHEEMIFNAA.james@wgold.demon.co.uk>
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
Face it: You're on the road less travelled. It can be fun, but it's a lonely place. I have had multiple 100% silent (no moving parts) FreeBSD workstations in my office for the last six years, and it really is the way to go, but every time I upgrade my main server, I wind up patching a bunch of rc.stuff and the docs are always lagging the code. It takes a few (mostly unattended) hours to reinstall Everything on my main (basement) FreeBSD server, and then it takes two days of fiddling to string together the weirdness that is the latest ever-evolving version of diskless support to resurrect my silent (office) workstations. I suspect that if the feature was more popular, it would receive more attention during QA and releasing. FreeBSD is not alone here; from xorg to gnome to xmms, somehow developers over the years have assumed that the same user would never have multiple X sessions active on multiple hosts using the same home directory. I know this is just one of many ways of using diskless boot, but like all the other ways, this is just not the sort of configuration that gets tested (much apparently) before promoting code to production.... which makes all the difference. How to fix this? Maybe a coordinated effort to clean up this part of the code for all and then keep it clean? Maybe we can leverage some of the recent mainstream attention to "silent PCs" to make this a more popular (as in "more often used") feature? cheers Helmut Hissen <helmut@zeebar.com> James Mansion wrote: > Thanks Vlidimir. > >> I think rc.diskless2 (and rc.diskless1 ) is 5.X related. >> > > I have to say, one of the things one hears about FreeBSD by > proponents is that the quality of documentation is supposed to be > better than linux. But it is depressing that when you read > the documentation, you then have to try and work out whether > it applies to 4.x, 5.x or is actually in any way related to > current 6.x systems. >
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?44D64862.1010701>