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

[Marshall Cline]

To avoid confusion, followups to this are requested to ONLY go to one
newsgroup.  I suggest comp.unix.questions.

In article <507 at lclark.UUCP> cullum at lclark.UUCP (Mike Cullum) writes:

>We are in the process of considering the purchase of workstations for
>a small lab in our Computer Science Department.  Our proposed 
>configuration calls for 8 workstations (8Mb RAM, 200+Mb disk, large
>monochrome display) and a server.  
>...
>Any advice?

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.

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.

Having a central location for files (the disk server) means that each
workstation that you log onto acts like it has your files.  No two
versions, etc.

Thus your comment for workstation having a 200+Mb disk is one which you
may want to reconsider.

There's a binary-compatibility problem with the NFS scheme, but we have
almost all Sun-3's (68020, 68881).  When we go to SparcStations (Sun-4's),
we'll have to address the multiple /bin directories, etc.

Hope this helps.
Marshall
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