regardless of one's terminal accomidations, i still think it makes a lot of sense to have a stand-alone fileserver. it really does stink if your fs goes down for no reason at all. this is especially true if you're doing a lot of experimenting or don't have a proper terminal.
Amen! Three times now I've lost everything due to a combined CPU/fileserver crashing. The joy of a diskless CPU server is it cannot corrupt your filesystem no matter what manner of stupid things you do.
My current fileserver runs fossil, venti, keyfs, secstored, dhcpd, and tftpd. I.e. only the bare minimum necessary to provide fileservice and bootstrap the diskless machines. (I will soon be moving the venti to a different machine to eliminate the current single point of disk failure.) It doesn't even have a keyboard hooked up. And it's rock solid. Real work is done on the diskless CPU server. Currently I drawterm to the CPU box, but that's because the terminal machine is in pieces waiting for some hardware upgrades.
--lyndon
