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your disk size carefully. If larger local disks are attached to dataless clients, they become inviting homes for user files that may not be backed up regularly. If you plan to configure dataless clients, use the smallest disk possible to contain the root and swap filesystems, with enough room on the local disk's root partition to contain a very large /var directory. Applications that use enough virtual memory to justify a local disk probably create huge temporary files on /var/tmp as well.

Management of dataless nodes is slightly more complex than that of diskless nodes. Even though the local disks contain no user files or tools, they may still have host-specific configuration information in the /etc directory, such as software password files. Use care when modifying the private parts of a dataless node so that the entire node can be recreated from a boot tape or archive tape if the local disk must be replaced. You will probably want to create a script that creates spool directories, copies printer configuration files, and creates NFS mount points on the client; you can use this script on dataless or new diskless clients as well. If possible, mount the dataless client spool directories from an NFS server so that the dataless client's disk contains no host-specific information. Ideally, you should not have to do backups of a dataless client.

After Solaris 2.5.1, the AdminSuite product stopped supporting the dataless configuration option. This is a bit of an inconvenience to you, but it is surmountable. Consider that a dataless client is like a disk-full client except that /usr is mounted from an NFS server instead of from a local disk. The steps for doing this are:

Install the operating system on a disk-full client. If possible (depending on how many disks you have and how big they are), install all the software without specify a /usr partition. If you have to, specify a separate /var partition if that is what it takes to prevent a /usr partition from being created. It's OK to have the /usr partition created, but once you mount /usr from the NFS server, the question then is what do you do with the redundant local disk space? You can always mount it as another partition, say /spare, and have it around for future additional needs such as more swap, or more /var space.

Edit /etc/vfstab on the client to mount /usr from an NFS server that has been set up for diskless client support. If there was an entry for /usr in /etc/vfstab, comment it out. For example you might comment out /usr 's vfstab: # /dev/dsk/c0t0d0s6 /dev/rdsk/c0t0d0s6 /usr ufs 1 no -

and add:wahoo:/export/exec/Solaris_2.7_sparc.all/usr - /usr nfs - - ro

Edit /etc/hosts and add the IP address of the NFS server. Both dataless and diskless clients require this, because while the system is booting, without /usr available, the software needed to access NIS or DNS won't be around, so /etc/hosts is needed to resolve the name of the NFS server to an IP address: 130.141.14.2 wahoo

Test this by rebooting the client. If you run into any problems, you can always shut the system down, and boot the system as single user.

There is a drawback to this scheme. Applying some patches and packages will be less straightforward, because patches and packages can contain both /usr and root files, but the dataless client's /usr partition won't be writable by the utilities used to add patches and packages. The workaround for this is very dependent on the patch and packaging scheme used by the operating system. In case of Solaris, the patchadd utility has a -R pathname option, which is normally used to apply patches to a diskless client's root partitions. In that case, patchadd is run on the NFS server. In the case of a dataless client, you would invoke patchadd as:

client # patchadd -R / -M . 107460-03

For a package that contains both root and /usr files, you could invoke the Solaris pkgadd command to install the package in a temporary place, and then copy the non-usr files to the dataless client's root:

client # mkdir /tmp/scratch

client # pkgadd -d . -R /tmp/scratch