Running Diskless
If you manage many computers, you probably understand that moving parts cause trouble. Spinning hard drives, in particular, are just a very bad idea.
Try this: If you have a roomful of identical machines, try simplifying maintenance by running them without hard drives. Each machine in this group will use a root directory and filesystem mounted via NFS rather than stored locally. You’ll still need data storage, but you can use a central high-availability disk array, flash drives, or some other mechanism with better reliability than lowest-common-denominator hard drives.
You can extend the diskless installation process to run OpenBSD in full multiuser mode without a local hard drive. Your server will need three additional services ...
Get Absolute OpenBSD, 2nd Edition now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
