29 Sep
2017
29 Sep
'17
10:59 a.m.
On Thu, Sep 28, 2017 at 03:20:56PM -0700, Larry McVoy wrote:
On Fri, Sep 29, 2017 at 08:08:16AM +1000, Dave
Horsfall wrote:
My main work setup today is actually a diskless (X11-less) OpenBSD
system. It's just something I set up in a VM environment to learn how
to do it (I'm on a work laptop running Windows 10, as I need Windows
for some few work-related tasks), but it works just fine and I have no
reason to change it. For one thing, it makes backups easier as they can
run locally on the server.
At some point I hope to buy I smaller dedicated server to run the NFS
server (and mail, etc.) but I see no real reason not to keep running the
diskless client in a VM on my laptop. Heck, then I might even be able
to netboot the laptop itself without disturbing the Windows system on it
at all...
On Thu, 28 Sep 2017, Clem Cole wrote:
I dunno why all the hating on diskless. They actually work, I used the
heck out of them. For kernel work, stacking one on top of the other,
the test machine being diskless, was a cheap way to get a setup.
Sure, disk was better and if your work load was write heavy then they
sucked (*), but for testing, for editing, that sort of thing, they were
fine.
--lm Truth is that an Sun-3 running
'diskless' != as an Apollo running
'twinned.' [There is a famous Clem' story I'll not repeat here from
Masscomp about a typo I made, but your imagination would probably be right
- when I refused to do build a diskless system for Masscomp]....
Not the infamous "dikless" workstation? I remember a riposte from a woman
(on Usenet?), saying she didn't know that it was an option...
(*) I did a distributed make when I was working on clusters. Did the
compiles on a pile of clients, all the data was on the NFS server, I started
the build on the NFS server, did all the compiles remotely, did the link
locally. Got a 12x speed up on a 16 node + server setup. The other kernel
hacks were super jealous. They were all sharing a big SMP machine with
a Solaris that didn't scale for shit, I was way faster.
OpenBSD has this "dpb" thing ("distributed ports builder",
/usr/ports/infrastructure/bin/dpb, http://man.openbsd.org/dpb) that
does distributed building of 3rd-party packages. It does exactly this,
sharing the sources over NFS.
Cheers,
--
Andreas Kusalananda Kähäri,
National Bioinformatics Infrastructure Sweden (NBIS),
Uppsala University, Sweden.