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From: Mikael Karpberg <karpen@ocean.campus.luth.se>
Message-Id: <199810071056.MAA11769@ocean.campus.luth.se>
Subject: Re: CDROM as system disk
In-Reply-To: <199810062326.QAA07881@silvia.hip.berkeley.edu> from Satoshi Asami at "Oct 6, 98 04:26:05 pm"
To: asami@cs.berkeley.edu (Satoshi Asami)
Date: Wed, 7 Oct 1998 12:56:42 +0200 (CEST)
Cc: current@FreeBSD.ORG
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According to Satoshi Asami:
> Hi,
> 
> I'm thinking about using CDROMs as boot (system) disks on our cluster.
> This is because the internal (IDE) drives shipped with the PCs seem to
> have an enormous failure rate (25% in 1 1/2 years) and it's also a
> pain in the backside to replace them.  (We have external (SCSI) disks
> too but would like to avoid using them as anything other than swap and
> logs for reasons that I will not go into here.)
> 
> So, the question is: is there anyone out there using this kind of
> setup?
> 
> Obviously lots of stuff (except /tmp and /var) has to be read-only,
> and I could get rid of most of the boot-time warnings and errors with
> the following patches (relative to -stable) to move motd and nologin
> to /var/run:
[patch removed]

> (Incidentally, nologin seems to belong to /var/run in all senses of the 
>  word; does anyone know why it's in /etc at all?)

I agree, it very much seem like it should be in /var/run to me.

> One problem is how to identify the hostname.  Since it is currently

Umm...
Why not Simply make your rc.conf set the hostname to: `cat /var/hostname`

> What do you guys think?  Am I totally off the mark?

Well... Moving /etc/nologin seems like a perfectly sane thing to do, except
for hysterical reasons. I see no reason to move anything else, however.
Just have the CDROM set hostname to /var/hostname and make /etc/motd a symlink
to /var/motd, or such. If you need some file to change, just make it a symlink
on the CD, and make the system go to /var/ that way instead of changing
the scripts. Or am I missing something?

  /Mikael

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