That is correct. The exact same thing was implemented in Apollo's
Domain OS.
HP took over Apollo, and they have a similar thing for their diskless
clients. There they have a directory with a special bit such that
every hostname has to be a file in that directory and every machine
can have their own file.
The good things about varlinks is that they are more general and can
easily implement both.
ln -s /usr/.${universe}bin /usr/bin
mkdir /usr/.ucbbin
mkdir /usr/.sysvbin
echo universe=sysv > /proc/1/varlinks
echo hostname=`hostname` > /proc/1/varlinks
ln -s /var/.tmp.${hostname} /var/tmp
If you want to do this for e.g. /etc/passwd as HP does for their
diskless clients, then you'd have to restrict write access to the
varlinks file in /proc: you wouldn't want your users to be able to set
hostname to ../tmp/my_new_passwd_file when /etc/passwd is a varlink to
/etc/${hostname} .
(Is it safe if you make the symlink point to "/etc/passwd.${hostname}"?)
Roger.
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