MacOS 9 configuration suggestions?

[Samuel Rydh]

On Sat, Aug 09, 2003 at 09:33:22PM -0400, Derrik Pates wrote:
> I know this sounds a little offtopic, but really, it's not. I've got a
> Powermac 7500/100 with a NewerTech MaxPowr CPU upgrade, making it a dual
> 604e/180. It runs Linux, and runs quite well and stable. And now,
> there's actually a need for me to take this old beast in to work, so
> that our web developers can do testing against browsers in MacOS 9.
> 
> So, what I want to do is have one moderately-large disk image file that
> will contain just apps and the system software, and act as the boot
> volume, which will be read-only,

MacOS doesn't like read-only boot volumes. Numerous applications
will complain/error when the pref folder is unwritable.

> and have each user's home directory have a
> smaller (50 MB or so?) disk image containing their prefs, cache, and any
> other data files. I can get MacOS configured fine, but trying to get the
> setup I am thinking of for prefs and data files is where I'm stuck.

If you have separate boot volumes, then you could
do something like

ifempty ${altconfig}
	blkdev:		/dev/hde7 -rw -boot	# Mac OS image
	blkdev:		/image/for/user1 -rw
} else {
	blkdev:		/dev/hde8 -rw -boot	# Mac OS image
	blkdev:		/image/for/user2 -rw
}

Or one could hack MOL in order to treat -ro disks as -rw but instead
of writing data to the medium, cache the differences in memory.

> I have 160 MB of RAM for the machine, and we probably won't have more than
> one or two users at a time running MacOS sessions, so I figure as long
> as I make sure I have some extra swap laying around, and the sessions
> are limited to 64 MB so (maybe 80, or 96, though that might be pushing
> it), users should be able to use ssh into the box, and 'startmol' their
> way into a MacOS session pretty simply.

Well, the main bottleneck is probably networking. Running
a remote session takes quite a bit of bandwidth.

/Samuel