[TUHS] The origin of /home

[Arrigo Triulzi]

On 27 Sep 2018, at 17:36, Jon Forrest <nobozo at gmail.com> wrote:
> Right, and I am that Jon Forrest

Well, made a fool of myself there!

> It's been a while, but what I remember is that DEC actually published
> their own method for doing this but it was surprisingly cumbersome.
> What I described was incredibly simple but effective. I ran many
> Alphas this way with no problems at all.

On OSF/1 T1.0, which is what we got shipped with our first Alphas, we were categorically told by REO that we were on our own. At the time there were four Alphas in the UK: three were ours and one was at REO running OpenVMS in the morning and OSF/1 in the afternoon (or vice-versa) and we spent a long weekend napping on the machine room floor and on caffeine trying to figure out how to get /usr mounted despite the SIA startup script as we had no choice and the cluster needed to be up as it had cost a small fortune.

The later DEC solution I recall requiring more disk space on the clients, which we didn’t have, but I’m sure that later ships with sufficient disk space had less issues.

Another weekend was spent getting TeX and LaTeX running with ghostscript MX’d from the Ultrix MIPS binary as we just couldn’t get it to compile. That it even worked using MX remains one of the most beautiful surprises of that install.

Arrigo