Re: [TUHS] RFS was: Re: UNIX of choice these days?

On Thu, Sep 28, 2017 at 6:20 PM, Larry McVoy <lm(a)mcvoy.com> wrote: We had a setup on Sun's running SunOS 4.1.x that I actually really liked; I believe it was referred to as "dataless". The root filesystem, /tmp and swap were local, along with scratch space on an arbitrarily named filesystem (I think we mounted that on /scratch, but I can't remember the details at this point). The difference between /tmp and /scratch was that the latter persisted across reboots and we backed it up. /usr, /usr/local came from a fileserver on the local ethernet and /home was automounted. Users didn't have local root access, and we kept / pretty well updated using rdist and some home-grown scripts; basically, we could throw / away at any time on any machine and rebuild it without losing much. Since all the administrative data like passwd, group et al all came from NIS it was almost the best of both worlds: the consistency and central management of diskless machines and the performance of having local disk. When the user wanted to do something temporary and IO intensive s/he just did it in /scratch or /tmp; everything else lived on the file server. We could deploy a new machine by netbooting it and dd'ing an image onto the disk. A script ran the first time it booted up that made whatever small modifications were necessary to files in /etc (this was before jumpstart and officially sanctioned network install systems) and away one went. It took about 10 minutes before the user could take over and get to work. It was a really nice, comfortable system. Of course, it wouldn't fly in this day and age for security and other reasons but back in the early 90s it was great. I didn't find a system I liked as much until I met plan9. In many ways, the environments were on these days feel like a regression. - Dan C.