What can I move to my NFS server

It looks like many FreeBSD files on hosts on a LAN are the same and never updated. Which of those files can/should I share on an NFS server?

/usr/src and /usr/ports are two directories that come to mind but I'm sure there are many others....

How about /usr/share, /usr/include ?
 
In theory you can share almost everything (besides a couple of configuration files) as that's the basis of a diskless client. But performance-wise it's not the best decision, everything will need to be loaded from the network which is always slower than getting it from a local disk.
 
balanga, I agree with SirDice about the performance concern.

And also, given how affordable modest storage hardware really is these days, I feel like centrally storing and sharing FreeBSD base system directories would be too likely to result in confusing and hard-to-remember dependencies between computers, to be worth the trouble.

And it really means that there's a lot on the line for that one NFS server--even rebooting it to apply security patches will become a complex procedure, which (practically speaking) means rebooting all of the NFS clients also (I know some will point out that there may be ways to avoid this--but the methods by which it's avoided are probably so much more complex than rebooting everything, that a real human in the real world's likely to go the reboot route anyways).

In other words, if you have a really strong reason to want to do this, maybe it'd be worth it, but you'd have to weigh in the huge disadvantages that'd come along with it (mainly availability concerns related to the dependency and a hard-to-remember, off-the-beaten-path configuration).

Happy days to you balanga.
 
..and I agreed with both SirDice and Robroy.

I always sanity check a discussion, or thought process with this simple question: What is the problem you are trying to fix? Doing something because you can may be fun or cool, but could come with a whole new set of issues.
 
Back
Top