Quota / Diskless Workstation?

[Les Mikesell]

David Frascone wrote:
> Ok -- this is not really distribution specific, but I figure you guys may
> know the answer :)
> 
> I have a couple of diskless machines that I boot off of one server.  Today,
> one of them mis-behaved, and dropped a huge log file, filling my server's
> disk.
> 
> I want to prevent this in the future.  So, I'm looking for suggestions.
> 
> I immediately thought of quotas, but, since the filesystems aren't owned by
> one user (they're full unix filesystems), that wouldn't work well.
> 
> I'm now trying to decide if it would be best to create a filesystem in a
> file, mount that, and share that over NFS for the root.
> 
> i.e.:
> dd if=/dev/zero of=/tftpboot/disk1.img count=whatever bs=whatever
> mkfs -t ext3 /tftpboot/disk1.img
> mount -o loop /tftpboot/disk1.img /tftpboot/disk1.mnt
> cp -a /tftpboot/oldDiskRoot/* /tftpboot/disk1.mnt
> 
> then share /tftpboot/disk1.mnt, instead of /tftpboot/OlddiskRoot
> 
> 
> 
> Any other suggestions?

If the server can handle it, boot the diskless machines as thin 
terminals with the ltsp package and run the desktop on the server.


-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com