On Monday 01 Oct 2012 15:34:41 Thomas Bächler wrote: > We have a 100MBit/s network, which may or may not be the bottleneck > Loading a modern desktop environment like KDE over NFS just takes too > long. A user needs to wait up to 5 minutes after login, starting > applications isn't instant, everything feels like 10 years ago > speed-wise. The same goes for boot times. > > The worst part however is that booting a Linux system over NFS never > works quite right out of the box, you need too many tricks to make it > work smoothly. > > As lot of the OS is shared, upgrading parts of the system while it is > running leads to problems. There is no way to share the entire system > EXCEPT a number of config files. > > All my machines now have a small hard drive or SSD and have an option in > the boot menu to sync an updated operating system on reboot - this uses > rsync and --exclude to omit certain config files that are per-machine. > Administration of this scheme has proven much easier and more robust > than the old NFS-based one. Makes sense. I would certainly think twice for something as complex as a full interactive desktop setup. I hold by NFS for this cluster, though. I really like your sync-on-boot solution. I'd like to store this information away for future use. How did you implement it? Something in an initrd hook? Paul
