[TUHS] /bin vs /sbin

[Chris Hanson]

On Jul 21, 2020, at 11:22 AM, arnold at 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