Date: Mon, 30 Nov 1998 12:32:33 -0500 (EST) From: Robert Watson <robert@cyrus.watson.org> To: Mike Smith <mike@smith.net.au> Cc: "Jason C. Wells" <jcwells@u.washington.edu>, FreeBSD-chat <freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: Re: Diskless Workstations Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.3.96.981130122822.15297B-100000@fledge.watson.org> In-Reply-To: <199811290843.AAA00385@dingo.cdrom.com>
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On Sun, 29 Nov 1998, Mike Smith wrote: > Indeed. You can address some of the performance issues with dataless, > rather than diskless, workstations (local OS copy, local config > replicated on a regular basis from a master server, apps and user data > mounted via NFS). I personally prefer an almost-diskless-workstation. That is, one that has a local disk but uses it only to bootstrap the boot process, and then for swap/cache space. With an on-disk cache with Coda or AFS, things perform very reasonably. I have not had a chance to try to set up one of these using Coda, but I might get around to it in a few weeks (once 5.0 of Coda is out). Coda is not ready for production use yet, but we're getting there. Given the success of such arrangements over AFS, I would anticipate that Coda could handle it quite well. The only problem with the arrangement may be the requirement for setuid binaries locally on workstation disks. Multiplatform distributed file systems with their own authentication/authorization scheme are not really compatible with the concept of a setuid binary. So one has the choice of eliminating setuid binaries (quite reasonable on a diskless x workstation -- no need for mail delivery, local password changing, etc, assuming we get /proc in good enough shape). For the uninitiated on the list, http://www.coda.cs.cmu.edu/ is a good source of information. Robert N Watson robert@fledge.watson.org http://www.watson.org/~robert/ PGP key fingerprint: 03 01 DD 8E 15 67 48 73 25 6D 10 FC EC 68 C1 1C Carnegie Mellon University http://www.cmu.edu/ TIS Labs at Network Associates, Inc. http://www.tis.com/ SafePort Network Services http://www.safeport.com/ To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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