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

[chiba]

In article <CLINE.89Jun9165618 at sun.soe.clarkson.edu> cline at sun.soe.clarkson.edu (Marshall Cline) writes:
>
>Clarkson University has quite a number of workstations, so I guess I
>have enough experince to answer.  However (almost) all ours are Sun's,
>so I can't compare.  However, I can _STRONGLY_ recommend one feature
>in particular:
>
>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.

I can't agree with this solution as being optimal. The "right"
solution is to have most workstations "dataless" (i.e. boot locally,
but nearly all files owned by a server). Each user tends has their
home on a "local" server.

The result of this sort of setup, is that I can login from any of a
large number of workstations and get my own "local" environment ...
yet by putting different folks on different servers, the network as a
whole is more robust and is more responsive.

Clearly "cleverly" locating my host "close" to my favored six or so
machines makes life better.
Keith H. Bierman      |*My thoughts are my own. Only my work belongs to Sun*
It's Not My Fault     |	Marketing Technical Specialist    ! kbierman at sun.com
I Voted for Bill &    |   Languages and Performance Tools. 
Opus  (* strange as it may seem, I do more engineering now     *)