CHAPTER 22 Adding Clients

22.1 Clients

There are four types of SunOS clients: diskless, dataless, standalone, and AutoClient. These must all be served by an NFS file server over the network. The diskless client has no disk. It must get root, swap, home, and system files from the server. The dataless client has a small local disk. It may have root and swap local, with system and home files on the server. The standalone client has all the files necessary to run the OS but may desire additional file systems from the server, e.g. the user home directories. The AutoClient is similar to the diskless client, except that it has a small disk for local caching.

An AutoClient should have an entire disk, of at least 100 MB, devoted to it. It uses the Cache File System (cachefs) to locally store /, /usr, and other cachefs mounted file systems. It can also use NFS to mount other file systems. It allows for fast access with centralized administration because there's no permanent data on the client. Everything is quickly reproduced by rebooting over the network from the server. You can install a client with the Solstice Host Manager GUI tool of SunOS 5.5+.

Under SunOS 5.3&.4 you add clients with the Admintool Host Manager GUI tool. We look at these admintool and solstice utilities in another chapter.

Unix System Administration - 8 AUG 1996

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