[TUHS] The origin of /home

Arrigo Triulzi arrigo at alchemistowl.org
Fri Sep 28 00:28:59 AEST 2018


> On 27 Sep 2018, at 16:18, Jon Forrest <nobozo at gmail.com> wrote:
> Another reason why the home directory part of /usr was made into
> /home is because after doing so, it was possible to mount /usr
> read-only, and supply it from a server. This was the so-called
> "dataless" method. I wrote a short email message summarizing
> what we were doing with this in UC Berkeley Comp. Sci., and mentioning
> a paper I had written describing how to create a "dataless"
> environment for DEC's OSF1 operating system (see
> http://beowulf.org/pipermail/beowulf/2008-July/022210.html).

Not to be pedantic but the OSF/1 “dataless” trick is from 1993 in Jon Forrest’s writeup:

https://groups.google.com/d/msg/comp.unix.osf.osf1/-s1xW80zXPE/OGENDhH2Sc0J

As one of the three people figuring out what DEC had told us was impossible I’m pretty sure we were the first - our DEC 3000/400s with OSF/1 T1.0 did not have enough disk space so we struggled to get our network operational serving /usr and /home from the “big” DEC 3000/600 which had two disks (one of which was /home).

Cheers,

Arrigo




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