🚀 go-pugleaf

I am trying to figure out how to make it possible for a user to do  
anything on a client that the user could do on the client's server.

My solution:

0. Setup the clients and server as a Netinfo database.

1. Make all accounts network accounts (I acquiesed to the /Net and /Users  
idiom of Next).

2. Load the base 60MB NS3.0 OS on each client.

3. Load all Next packages on the server.

4. Load all third party apps on the server into /LocalApps.

5. Export the following from the server as ReadOnly using the 3.0 NFS App  
(these are the directories affected by steps 3 and 4 above):

/LocalLibrary
/usr
/Users
/NextDeveloper
/bin
/lib
/NextLibrary
/NextApps
/LocalApps

6. Import each of the above on the clients using the 3.0 NFS App. Mount  
them to /Net/server/... on the clients.

7. Replace the step 5 directories on the clients with soft links to their  
corresponding /Net/server/... step 6 mounts.

8. Make the server the mail server.

9. Make each client a mail client of the server.

10. Adjust the clients' sendmail.sharedsubsidiary.cf file to cause mail  
sent from them to bear the server's name instead of their own.

11. Adjust our campus domain name server to send mail addressed to any of  
the clients to the host instead. Adjust the server's sendmail.mailhost.cf  
file to have alias' for each of the clients so the host does not reject  
the redirected mail.
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My first question is how many of the step 5 directories need Read/Write  
access? For example I know that /usr/spool/mail-->/private/spool/mail  
needs to be writable by the clients. So maybe I need to export  
/private/spool/mail and liberalize the permissions of that path. Also for  
example does /NextDeveloper need Read/Write access if you're doing  
NextStep development?

I also know that /usr/lib/sendmail is different on the clients than the  
server. How many other such inconsistancies are there?

Also our server is a monochrome Cube and our clients are both mono and  
color slabs. Are there some different OS file requirements here?

If this overall problem can be resolved it would be really neat, because  
we could work on our server or clients completely transparently, and all  
upgrades could be confined to the server.

BTW we didn't use NetBoot, because each client has a good sized hard drive  
that can be used as a local swap disk. I understood that there was no way  
to have local swap disks with NetBooting.

I hope my naivete isn't showing TOO badly here.

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Greg Colello
Carnegie Institution, Department of Plant Biology
Stanford University
gcolello@biosphere.stanford.edu