Answer to Diskless Client Question

[Karen Petraska-Veum]

Thanks to everyone who responded to my  posting from a few weeks ago regarding
having both the diskless client server and the diskless clients sharing the
same /usr instead of having the clients use /dlenv0/rootn.mips/usr.  I got
more responses than I could respond to personally, both via mail and postings.

The consensus was that although that configuration is NOT supported by DEC,
everyone is doing it and it works fine.  The cautions were that I would need to
have /var on the server be a separate partition and dms might break.

So, I installed the server completely (and made /var a separate partition),
 and then installed the client environment completely.  I created the clients 
(I won't be adding or deleting any clients, so I don't care if this breaks 
dms) and made sure that they would boot, etc.  Then, I removed 
/dlenv0/root0.mips/usr and changed the client fstabs to mount /usr at server 
rather than /dlenv0/root0.mips/usr at server.  My setup works fine.  dlenv0 
without the usr tree is only about 8Meg.  I don't know if I'll ever need it or
not, but I left it there anyway.  The only problem I ran into is that the 
clients when booting want to load /dlenv0/root0.mips/usr/mdec/netload.  I had 
to restore that file.  Its the same as /usr/mdec/netload, so a link could 
probably be made to that effect.

Thanks to all who took the time to respond.  i appreciate all the input.

Karen Petraska, Systems
University of Maryland Baltimore County
karen at umbc3.umbc.edu