NFS tuning for clients with small local disks - Summary

[Sean Marrett]

About ten days ago, I posted a message asking if anyone had experience 
trying to tune a network of SGI systems that had small (200Mbyte)
local disks. Although I got one responsesuggesting splitting along /
and /usr lines, no one reported experience in trying to split things
along the client/shared tree line. This turns out to be quite tricky,
since
many of the elements in the client tree turn out to be links, and
there doesn't seem to be any way to upgrade software cleanly, since
install insists on having NFS shut down when it runs. So, we have
decided to just install local /tmp and swap files. For a good
discussion of this and other tuning questions, there is an SGI
document which  you can request from your local rep:

"NFS and Diskless Workstations: a guide to tuning for performance" by
Paul Reilly, Technical Marketing, SSD, SGI.

If anyone has any experience relevant to this question, we would still
appreciate any info. Please e-mail to me directly, and I will
summarize. Any progress on the ubiquitous FAQ file ?


Sean Marrett
Brain Imaging
Montreal Neurological Institute
sean at petvax.medcor.mcgill.ca
neuro at thunder.mcrcim.mcgill.ca