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Date:      Tue, 23 Apr 2002 03:38:59 -0700
From:      Terry Lambert <tlambert2@mindspring.com>
To:        obrien@FreeBSD.ORG
Cc:        Danny Braniss <danny@cs.huji.ac.il>, Freebsd Current <current@FreeBSD.ORG>
Subject:   Re: FreeBSD 5.0 Developer Preview #1 Now Available / diskless booting
Message-ID:  <3CC539C3.6A1B0281@mindspring.com>
References:  <obrien@FreeBSD.ORG> <E16ztee-0002kl-00@cs.huji.ac.il> <20020422234701.A52794@dragon.nuxi.com>

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David O'Brien wrote:
> > / ( and whatever is under it) is NFS mounted read only, as should be.
> 
> This is where all of us doing Sparc64 development say you are wrong -- /
> is NFS mounted RW.  Back in the SunOS diskless workstations days were
> this was invented, / was NFS mounted RW.  Please stop assuming everyone
> wants to change from tradition.

While it's true that this was the case for workstations, where
you would end up having 128 workstations and 128 copies of the
/ directory on the server for the diskless/dataless workstations,
I think the R/W mount was out of necesssity, not out of desirability.

For most of the work I've done over the past 5/6 years, it's really
desirable to have / mounted read-only.


> > the 'original' solution is to make /etc writable is to mount a MD, then copy
> > all
> > /conf/default/etc to it.
> 
> The very original "solution" was to mount NFS / RW.  The move to
> /conf/default/etc was someone's special needs leaking into the FreeBSD
> repository.  If you want to special case, things be my guest -- add an
> elif test; but leave RW NFS mounted / alone.

This isn't just about NFS... it's also about Fash devices, which
are only warranteed for a limited number of writes, which mounting
R/W would really eat into, and it's for read-only media, like in
the "ClosedBSD" and "PicoBSD" FreeBSD based firewalls, I think.

-- Terry

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