Date: Fri, 11 Apr 1997 11:37:41 -0700 (MST) From: Terry Lambert <terry@lambert.org> To: somsky@dirac.phys.washington.edu (William R. Somsky) Cc: hackers@freefall.freebsd.org Subject: Re: on the subject of changes to -RELEASEs... Message-ID: <199704111837.LAA11819@phaeton.artisoft.com> In-Reply-To: <199704111715.KAA01708@dirac.phys.washington.edu> from "William R. Somsky" at Apr 11, 97 10:15:45 am
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> Um... Maybe I'm wrong, tell me if I am, but I thought that, > at least at one time, one of the virtues of /var was that it > was meant to be a "semi-scratch" space, containing spool > directories and logs and such, but nothing critical -- > if it got filled or trashed, you perhaps lost mail messages > and print jobs and such, but didn't destroy your system. If > the traditional /etc local system modifications files go there, > it loses all these nice properties. But then, I guess I have > seen things like yp put there, which would be nasty to lose. > > Was this ever the case? Or have I completely misinterpreted > what /var was meant for? I'm confused... Please, enlighten > me a bit, if you can (tall order, I know :-). The invention of /var by Sun was to support read-only mounting of / by moving *variable* per-system data to a known location. The intent of this was to support diskless, dataless, and OSless configurations from a central boot server, without needing a seperate root/boot image per machine which the server services. Novell actually ran a large number of Sun client machines this way from a central server -- large enough that the disk savings ran into hundreds of thousands of dollars (how much did a 600M SCSI drive cost in 1992? 8-)). This knit well with each engineer using his local disk space for swap and source trees instead of uselessly duplicating OS files, and with one of the common servers being the common CVS repository. Regards, Terry Lambert terry@lambert.org --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers.
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