pseudo-diskless/dataless clients (a suggestion for Sun) ??

[Larry Beaulieu]

> What would be nice is to make diskless clients swap locally and have
> temporaries like (/tmp, /var/spool/mqueue, /var/tmp, ...) reside on local
> disks.  

DEC specificially allows a diskless configuration witl local page/swap on
their workstations - both VMS and Ultrix - as a 'standard' feature.

The method they use is to define the client nodes on the server as
diskless, but to include support for the disk(s) in the kernel and then to
specify the local disk as the page/swap device, using something like: 

	config vmunix  swap on sd6b	

in the configuration file(s) for the client(s). 

You could probably prepare the local disk for use by /tmp and /var on your
Suns by running suninstall on the client as a diskless node and completing
the portion where it prepares the local disk for use, exiting suninstall,
and then using newfs to make the raw partitions usable, after which you'd
change /etc/fstab to reflect the new locations of /var and /tmp. 

Personally, I'm not sure the additional work to put /tmp and /var would be
worth it if you have a lot of clients to set up, although local page and
swap is REALLY nice; we use it on the client workstations on our MI
VAXcluster.

I hope Sun makes this a standard option in suninstall.  While I'm at it, I
hope they MODIFY THEIR KERNEL so that you can specify multiple swap
partitions in the configuration file without having to deal with swapon,
LIKE YOU CAN DO ON ULTRIX (and like the 4.0.3 documentation CLAIMS you can
do). 

Sometimes DEC does do something right.

Larry Beaulieu 				...uunet!gca!beaulieu	
SMTS/Software Engineer
GCA Corporation, 			"Live to step, step to live..."	
Andover, MA