| replying to.  If we are going to go that far, what was the system
| that Apollos(?) used to use with environment variables?

  Yup, Apollo Domain/OS has some magic in the symbolic link
resolving code. You could make a link 'node_data/etc (yes,
the apostrophe is part of the name), and it would resolve
to node2AFB3_data/etc (or whatever the node id of this 
machine would be). This was heavily used for netbooting,
by just having a bunch of generic links in /etc, referring
to some appropriate subdirectory for that machine.

  Hmm, sounds confusing. For example (I can't really remember
if the layout was exactly like that, but it's close), a
netbooted machine just mounted the root disk from the server
machine, and every machine-specific file was actually a
magic symlink pointing to a subdir for that machine. So
it is possible to use _the same_ disk (and only one mount)
for all netbooted clients.

  Domain/OS had some pretty neat stuff...

	mjl