[TUHS] /bin vs /sbin

[Dan Cross]

On Tue, Jul 21, 2020 at 2:35 PM Warner Losh <imp at bsdimp.com> wrote:

> On Tue, Jul 21, 2020 at 12:23 PM <arnold at skeeve.com> wrote:
>
>> [snip]
>
> The idea was that /etc held things specific to a box, while /bin, /sbin,
>> /usr could be remote mounted from a server.  This is also when /home
>> came into practice as the place to hold home directories.
>>
>> This avoided having umpteen zillion copies of the same files
>> (executables, man pages, libraries, etc.) since they could be mounted
>> read-only from one or a few servers.  At the time, disk space was not
>> nearly as cheap as it is now.
>>
>
> A big cost savings in having 20 diskless workstations was that you didn't
> need the 2-4gb of disks for each individual one, but instead could have one
> copy of the 100MB-200MB of the core OS. When. X started getting libraries
> out the wazoo with toolkit wars, it saved even more. IIRC, the Sun 3/50's
> ethernet port was faster than its disk port, so your diskless workstation
> could be faster than one with a disk (assuming the network wasn't
> overloaded).
>

When I first came on the scene, there was a convention that I thought
worked well: the "dataless" node. I have no idea why it was called that; I
suppose because most interesting data was on a centrally managed file
server. Anyway, this was under SunOS 4: the idea was that each node had a
small disk; enough to hold / and swap, but mounted /usr, /usr/local and
user directories from a file server. So commonly used stuff (/bin/csh, ls,
etc etc) all came from a local disk, while everything else was shared.
Disks in workstations were small and basically turn-key so that we didn't
back them up: if one crashed, oh well: throw a new one in it and reimage /.
Swap was transient anyway. A variation was to have an owning-user's home
directory on the node if the local disk was big enough. Sometimes there'd
be a /scratch partition for bulk storage that persisted across reboots
(/tmp came from tmpfs and was a swap-backed RAM disk). We'd back up local
home dirs and maybe the scratch directories.

In our network, we used `amd` and NIS (YP!) to get access to everyone's
home dir on every node.

I rather liked the overall setup; it was nice. It became a deprecated
configuration on the move to Solaris 2.x: a workstation was either diskfull
or diskless. The idea of a compromise between the two extremes went away.

        - Dan C.
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