29 Jan
2021
29 Jan
'21
11:50 p.m.
On Jul 21, 2020, at 11:22 AM, arnold(a)skeeve.com wrote:
This is also when /var came into being for log files and such;
again - it was per machine space, so it lived either on a small disk
in the workstation or on a per-client chunk of space on the server
if the client was totally diskless.
And then NeXT went a little further, making /etc, /var, and /tmp symlinks to entries in
/private, so each netbooted system only needed two main mount points:
/ could be read-only, served from any number of servers for load-balancing, and shared
among all systems running NEXTSTEP (even across architectures, thanks to multi-arch
binaries).
/private could be per-machine and could come from a server near that machine to manage
load.
It meant your admins just needed the MAC address of a new system (to create the NetInfo
/machines entry for it) and it would be immediately usable on the network.
All of our NeXT-derived operating systems still follow this filesystem layout, though only
a tiny number (relatively speaking) are netbooted these days. (I don't even remember
whether netboot is supported any more…)
-- Chris