On Mon, 3 Dec 2001, Andy Ball wrote:

> If I were building a machine that had little disk space, but
> was connected to a network that could serve up NFS shares,
> what would I keep local to the workstation? I was guessing a
> root partition with a kernel and perhaps some other odds &
> ends on it, along with a swap partition.

As long as the machines are all the same architecture and version, that
should work. You almost certainly want to keep /etc local. Be careful if
you use pkgsrc though, because if you share that, although you will be
able to you packages from /usr/pkg, the package database won't be shared,
so be careful not to use any of the pkg_* tools or do a make in
/usr/pkgsrc on the NFS client machines.

> Looking at Bushfire (the machine I just installed), / is
> under 21Mb (I'm not sure how quickly that will grow), so
> perhaps each workstation could have a fairly ordinary /
> partition locally and mount /usr over the network?

How big a disc do you have in the client machines?

> About this time last year, Havard Eidnes asked...
>
>   HA> I don't suppose that NetBSD lends itself to being
>     > burned onto an [E]PROM?
>
>              ...which is still a question that intrigues me.

How big is an [E]PROM? ;o)

It can be made to fit into a flash card or similar, but unless you get a
rather big one, you'll have to be very careful what you put on it.

Having said that, you might get away with a kernel, and a minimal /, with
a memory disc for /tmp, and nfs mounting everything else...

-- 
Gillette - the best a man can forget