diskless 4D/20 personal iris on 340VGX server

[Eugene Amdur]

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 at vis.toronto.edu
or ..!{uunet, pyramid, watmath, ubc-cs}!utai!gene