Re: [TUHS] /bin vs /sbin

When I first came on the scene, there was a convention that I thought worked well: the "dataless" node. I have no idea why it was called that; I suppose because most interesting data was on a centrally managed file server. Anyway, this was under SunOS 4: the idea was that each node had a small disk; enough to hold / and swap, but mounted /usr, /usr/local and user directories from a file server. So commonly used stuff (/bin/csh, ls, etc etc) all came from a local disk, while everything else was shared. Disks in workstations were small and basically turn-key so that we didn't back them up: if one crashed, oh well: throw a new one in it and reimage /. Swap was transient anyway. A variation was to have an owning-user's home directory on the node if the local disk was big enough. Sometimes there'd be a /scratch partition for bulk storage that persisted across reboots (/tmp came from tmpfs and was a swap-backed RAM disk). We'd back up local home dirs and maybe the scratch directories. In our network, we used `amd` and NIS (YP!) to get access to everyone's home dir on every node. I rather liked the overall setup; it was nice. It became a deprecated configuration on the move to Solaris 2.x: a workstation was either diskfull or diskless. The idea of a compromise between the two extremes went away. - Dan C.