FreeBSD vs. Illumos

[cy@]

Not just diskless X terminals, entire workstations booted disklessly. This was a big thing with SunOS 4 on SPARCstations.

To save disk space it was well supported to only have individual filesystems per workstation for the root filesystem with etc, var and the like. And have a /usr that was readonly mounted and shared between all workstations. I actually ran FreeBSD like that for a while, but it is too much headache for patching.

Of course now you don't need it anymore if you have ZFS with dedup on.

I remember that. The year I transferred from MVS system programming (IBM mainframe) to UNIX, I was the junior guy in the UNIX team of four people at the company. One of my assignments was the training lab of a SunOS 4 workstation (for a teacher) and twelve diskless workstations. They used the bootp protocol. The NFS shares for the rootfs and swap were handled during boot while /usr, /var, home directories were mounted typically. Single signon was handled by YP, that was before YP was renamed to NIS.

This brings back a lot of memories. I was so very green with UNIX at the time. I felt like grashopper next to my sensei at the time. (Our roles have switched many many moons ago.)

Those were exciting days in my quest to learn this "new" to me group of O/Ses. We just installed Solaris 2.1 on a Sun 2000 and a Sun 1000 on the raised floor, with a DG/UX, an HP-UX, and an a couple of NCR (SYSVR4) machines. Everyone had Solaris pizzabox workstatins except for me with an old Sun 1 (shoebox) SunOS 4 workstation that didn't have enough RAM to run Openlook. So I used screen. Exciting days to a younger me, indeed. Certainly feeling old now.

 

[Alain De Vos]

You are not older. Just wiser