# What can I move to my NFS server



## balanga (Mar 17, 2018)

It looks like many FreeBSD files on hosts on a LAN are the same and never updated. Which of those files can/should I share on an NFS server?

/usr/src and /usr/ports are two directories that come to mind but I'm sure there are many others....

How about /usr/share, /usr/include ?


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## SirDice (Mar 19, 2018)

In theory you can share almost everything (besides a couple of configuration files) as that's the basis of a diskless client. But performance-wise it's not the best decision, everything will need to be loaded from the network which is always slower than getting it from a local disk.


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## robroy (Mar 19, 2018)

balanga, I agree with SirDice about the performance concern. 

And also, given how affordable modest storage hardware really is these days, I feel like centrally storing and sharing FreeBSD base system directories would be too likely to result in confusing and hard-to-remember dependencies between computers, to be worth the trouble. 

And it really means that there's a lot on the line for that one NFS server--even rebooting it to apply security patches will become a complex procedure, which (practically speaking) means rebooting all of the NFS clients also (I know some will point out that there may be ways to avoid this--but the methods by which it's avoided are probably so much more complex than rebooting everything, that a real human in the real world's likely to go the reboot route anyways).

In other words, if you have a really strong reason to want to do this, _maybe_ it'd be worth it, but you'd have to weigh in the huge disadvantages that'd come along with it (mainly availability concerns related to the dependency and a hard-to-remember, off-the-beaten-path configuration).

Happy days to you balanga.


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## PacketMan (Mar 23, 2018)

..and I agreed with both SirDice and Robroy.

I always sanity check a discussion, or thought process with this simple question:  What is the problem you are trying to fix?  Doing something because you can may be fun or cool, but could come with a whole new set of issues.


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