[plug] Installing Debian

[Matt Kemner]

On Mon, 19 Mar 2001, Simon Scott (SSC) wrote:

> You can also share swap partitions I believe, and obviously you would want
> to share /home

Yep should be no problems doing that
 
> Beyond that things would start to get hairy as the differences beween
> distros would probably bite you on the ass with /usr, /var etc.

That would definitely be a bad idea.  /var/spool should work ok though

> Just out of interests sake, obviously I would need read/write access to
> /home and /var, but would it work if I mounted all the other partitions as
> read only?

That will work just fine.  At home I have /usr/ on a seperate partition
which is mounted read-only, and the only problems I have is remembering to
remount it read-write before apt-getting anything :)

> This is also interesting from the perspective of running a thin-ish client
> with the major partitions mounted via NFS. You would only really need /boot
> and /var on the client I believe? Might be cool to try.

/var can be handled by having a seperate /var/ set up on the server for
each client, and /boot/ can be handled by using somethign like bootp, so
you don't need anything on the local machine.. This is how X terms (and
other diskless workstations) work.

> Anyone played with this sort of thing?

Briefly, when playing with spark, before I donated it to PLUG

 - Matt