Academic workstations -- Followups to comp.unix.questions ONLY

[Rick Daley]

In article <CLINE.89Jun9165618 at sun.soe.clarkson.edu> 
cline at sun.soe.clarkson.edu (Marshall Cline) writes:
> We have a SINGLE disk server in our School of Engineering, all other
> workstations being diskless (thin wire 10Mb/s Ethernet), being
> connected via Sun's NFS.  There are probably 20 or more "clients"
> running off this one server.  Although we're pushing the performance
> of the disk server, the concept of a single disk server is the BEST
> THING SINCE SLICED BREAD.
> 
> The problem can be illustrated with our micro-computers (5000 or so AT
> class machines on the campus, well over 1000 with hard disks).
> Consider a student "Joe".  Joe's files are on a particular machine.
> If that machine is busy today, he has to copy his files onto whatever
> machine he happens to get.  Thus he duplicate all his files on all the
> machines he might be working on.  Then there's the "which is the
> latest version?" question.  The end result is that our students have
> to floppy-jocky everyday.

The original question had to do with which UNIX workstation to buy for a 
student lab.  I'm obviously biased about that, but I do have a comment
about Marshall's push  for a diskless environment.  His argument is that
this keeps students from having to use  floppies to move
their files between machines in the lab.  Well, this is indeed important, 
but it has nothing to do with whether the machines should be diskless.  
All this means is that student's files should be stored on an NFS file 
server.  The machines could still have local disks which are used for the 
OS and for paging.  This should give you better performance because local 
disks should be faster than networks, but it also adds to the cost and 
administration effort.

                                                Rick Daley
                                                rpd at Apple.COM