Date: Mon, 22 Sep 1997 16:26:17 -0700 (PDT) From: "Jamil J. Weatherbee" <jamil@counterintelligence.ml.org> To: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org Cc: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Diskless Workstation -- Problems needing to be addressed Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.3.96.970922161518.1044A-100000@counterintelligence.ml.org>
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I myself, am sold on the idea of diskless freebsd workstations, for my applications they greatly reduce the amount of maintenance that needs to be done aon a machine plus when stupid people panic and fluip the power switch there aren't any problems with drives being spammed -- one thing I have learned is that 100 base T networking is something you will definetely want to have for this --- with it there is no real difference in feeling between a machine with a hard drive and one without, I was able to set up a pentium 100 and a couple of nexgens 110s as some very suitable freebsd fully featured workstations/X stations (32MB) for about $800 a piece, and also by burning some eproms I dont need a floppy either, hell the only moving parts in the whole machine is the power supply which could be eliminated by using a centralized dc 12/5 power supply plus probably some filter capacitors at the endpointd due to the distance. Anyway having three of these disklesss workstations and one master server I just wanted to make my environment available for testing related things related to this, I have written some scripts that after a make world on a master server automatically mirror over things like /lkm /bin , and a kernel to each machines deirectory. I think there should be an option for easily setting up diskless workstations in the installation, because there are a different set of things that need to be done on the master server, also since a root directory is not as critical (in terms of having all the binaries needed to repair the system on a diskless machine I think a significant amount of reorganizing could be done to the diskless workstation directory structure there are other problems too for instance I have yet to figure out why when I have the /usr partition mounted read only from the master server and I run finger on the diskless machines as a regular user I get a finger: permission denied message? Are there some restrictions on things like running suid binaries on mounted volumes because of the obvious security hole if a user mounts a suid binary that would allow him to gain root priveledges etc.
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