RE: tlug: Linux on the university Win LAN

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <turnbull@example.com>]

>>>>> "FB" == Frank Bennett <bennett@example.com> writes:

    FB> I once took a stab at setting up a set of NFS-boot terminals
    FB> here.  I got it to work, but it took a lot of effort, and in
    FB> the end I concluded that I wouldn't have time to maintain it.
    FB> You're looking at a level of effort close to that required to
    FB> create and maintain a small distro.  Not for the faint of
    FB> heart.  Nor the sound of mind, for that matter :-).

Hm.  I don't think it's that bad, particularly if you start with a
distro with a reasonably flexible package manager (Debian dpkg +
dselect is fine, I'm sure there are others) and have plenty of disk
space to allocate to supporting the terminals.  (You can surely share
/usr/share with your personal user system, subject to controlling
access, but this can often be done at the NFS server level.  /lib and
/usr/lib, /bin and /usr/bin may be problems.  And you must not share
/etc, in fact, you surely want a separate /etc per client.  You
probably also want separate /tmp and /var space, although some things
like /var/lib/texmf can be shared.)

There are a small number of crucial configuration files in /etc, you
need to lock down root tight (in fact, there's no reason why root
_ever_ needs to log in on an NFS-root terminal).  Thinking up the
scheme is timeconsuming (and I've found that the available packages
for Debian do not suit my needs/tastes), but once you have the setup,
maintenance shouldn't be terrible.

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