Diskless & Thin Systems

[Jason Straight]

On Tuesday 21 March 2006 12:30, Jonathan Carter wrote:
> Hi Matt
>
> On Mon, 2006-03-20 at 10:10 -0800, Matt Zimmerman wrote:
> > On Mon, Mar 20, 2006 at 06:33:44PM +0100, Martin Kreiner wrote:
> > > the right approach for a "out-of-the-box" diskless client would be a ro
> > > shared nfs and unionfs.
> >
> > It is conceptually tempting; however, our experiments showed that unionfs
> > over NFS was an unstable configuration.  That's why our thin client
> > implementation doesn't use it, though the code is still there and can be
> > switched on via the configuration file.
>
> Sorry for replying so late after the thread, I'm behind on -devel. What
> was the major issues with this? Is it listed in Launchpad or the wiki?
> I'm interested in doing this as well, for a diskless fat client set-up.
> I'm using the ubuntu LTSP chroot instead of doing it for scratch, since
> I think it could be an Edubuntu installation option in the future as
> well.
>
> -Jonathan

One thing I noticed about unionfs is that while it handles removing and 
creating new files fine, appending and overwriting are not handled well or at 
all.

For instance when during startup motd is to be overwritten by a mv command 
startup will pause and ask if you want to override mode 0644.

And in the case of mtab being appended to it simply will not work.

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