Wanted: Experience of a MacII* A/UX (DWB) file server on a network

[Robert Marks]

We're considering replacing an aging Vax 11/780 under Unix SV.2.2 with
a network of MacII*s under MacOS/Finder.  But we have some expert
troff users (we produce the Australian Journal of Management to
camera-ready stage including the covers on our Vax+LaserWriters, and
have some expert statisticians whose research is written up using
the DWB tools (grap, pic, tbl, eqn, ditroff -mm).  I can find no
evidence that anyone is considering porting the DWB tools to the
MacOS/Finder.

But since A/UX includes the DWB 2.0 tools, the thought occurred to
me to hang a headless MacII* off the Ethernet and allow users to
remote-login using Telnet or somesuch to download their files
(edited on their own machines) to the A/UX file server for troff
processing and then printing from the network LaserWriter.
(We could install a MacIIcx with 8 Mb RAM to serve the 6 or 8 users who
would want to avail themselves of the A/UX.)

Questions:
1.  Our local guru (who has no direct experience of A/UX) claims that
it would be a full-time job to support such a multi-user system, which
I regard as a very unlikely claim.  Anyone with experience?

2.  He further disparages the response times for remote users on such
a set-up, speaking a a four-minute delay for file retrieval and very
slow log-ins.  This is less of a worry, even if true, since our
creaking Vax is already overloaded and not very fast at the best of times.

I'd welcome any comments/personal experience on this, since I have
volunteered to support such a file server (not the whole network, though),
and I -- although an experienced user -- am not a sysop, yet.
Thanks, Bob

bobm at agsm.oz.au