4.1 serving 4.0.3?

[Carl Rigney]

In article <9844 at brazos.Rice.edu> you write:
>
>We're about to upgrade one of our servers to 4.1, but we still have a need
>for 4.0.3. The sun documentation for 4.1 implies in one place that a 4.1
>server CAN serve 4.0.3 clients, but elsewhere it says that you can only
>piggyback OS 4.1 and above that way. Has anyone done it successfully? How
>well does it perform? Are there any anomalies in the naming conventions?

You can run SunOS 4.0.3 clients from SunOS 4.1, but you have to set things
up yourself; the sun features that make it easy to support different
releases in parallel only start with 4.1.

If you're familiar with all the different pieces needed for a client then
supporting 4.0.3 booting from 4.1 isn't too hard; getting add.client to
work properly appears harder, but I haven't actually looked too deeply
into that because we don't plan to add any more 4.0.3 clients; we just
want to keep the ones we have going.  (And if we had to add another I
could do it manually by cloning the one we have now; not nearly as nice as
add_client, but doable.)

We haven't noticed any noticeable difference in performance, but we
haven't looked too closely.  We're moving away from diskless workstations
to local disks for swap, root, tmp and sometimes usr, with only home
directories and /usr/local mounted from the servers.

Let me know if you'd like a listing of where all the symlinks point to,
but its pretty straightforward to figure out; no magic.

Carl Rigney
cdr at amdcad.AMD.COM
{ames decwrl pyramid sun uunet}!amdcad!cdr