Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!allosaur.cis.ohio-state.edu!bob
From: bob@allosaur.cis.ohio-state.edu (Bob Sutterfield)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.next
Subject: Re: diskless NeXT? (was Re: Announcement vs reality)
Keywords: Next
Message-ID: <28185@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu>
Date: 22 Nov 88 16:22:09 GMT
References: <17846@glacier.STANFORD.EDU> <3638@pt.cs.cmu.edu>
Sender: news@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu
Organization: The Ohio State University Dept of Computer & Information Science
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In article <3638@pt.cs.cmu.edu> ralphw@ius3.ius.cs.cmu.edu (Ralph Hyre) writes:
>I saw one the other day.  The use that silly new IBM/new DEC/ISO
>stupid keyboard format, with the ESC key in the wrong place.  (I was
>told it can be remapped, but so what?)

The one that I configured into our network last week (name, address,
ifconfig, route, named, NFS, YP, voila) had a key at the upper-left
corner imprinted with ` and ~ (like a Macintosh).  It had already been
remapped (like my Macintosh under uw) to ESC.

>Is anyone thinking (or asked NeXT) about buying a totally diskless machine?

They said that they can boot over NFS, but *every* machine will have
the optical drive.

>It might be useful for public clusters of machines where you don't want
>to let the user control the state of the machine by booting up a special
>copy of the operating system (maybe this will only be a problem at CMU).

Heck no, large networked installations are everyone's problem :-)
Hopefully there will be a way to ignore suid and sgid bits on
filesystems mounted from the optical disk, at the very least.  There
are lots of other things to worry about.  I'd want to completely
disable booting from the floppy on a non-secure workstation.  In a
network environment, I'd want to completely disable booting from any
local Winchester disk, as well.

>The extant Mach installations around here (on Suns, for example)
>don't yet completely support diskless servering/booting, but there
>must be SOME way to do it.  Probably boot prom mods at least are
>required.

Hmmm, we had heard that CMU was working on diskless Sun booting for
their Mach.  We're looking forward to using it here.

I don't know whether CMU's scheme will be the same as NeXT's scheme,
but that probably depends upon how much is being fed back from NeXT to
CMU, and how closely NeXT is tracking CMU's work.  Without NeXT's Mach
sources, it would be pretty hard to choose one or the other.

>...and the ethernet interface should be capable of ~8Mbps peak
>(assuming Van Jacobsen's header-prediction TCP stuff will port)

The Van TCP stuff is already there, I was told.