Has anyone had experience with NFS-mounted root partitions?

I've got a working setup (RH6.0 clients), but I'd like to move to RH7
and to improve the setup by making the root "smaller".  At the moment
each diskless client mounts its own 60MB root partition (rw) and they
share a /usr partition (ro).  The diskspace is not an issue, but when
I want to install or upgrade RPMs on the client machines, I need to
patch the changed files on each of the client root partitions.

I'd like the machines to NFS mount the *same* (ro) root partition
(so they can share the one set of config files), with a small /var
partition mounted rw (for e.g. /var/lock).  The major problem with
this is /etc/fstab, which has the IP-address-dependent root NFS mount
details (even though it has to know that to get at /etc/fstab in the
first place) and of course /etc/mtab.  And there may be other stuff
outside /var that is written to (methinks /etc/ntp/drift really ought
to be /var/ntp/drift).  Any ideas?

There might be other problems with the machines not being identical
- e.g. different video cards - but I can make /etc/X11/XF86Config a
symlink to something on /var.

Danny.
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