Seeking a Development Environment (Sun?)

[Barry Shein]

From: "Jeff Diewald  (...!linus!axiom!lpi!jeff" <jeff%lpi.uucp at BRL.ARPA>
>Everyone we've talked to has a "one Sun/one user" system.  Has anyone
>tried using a network of Suns as we suggest?  What sort of problems 
>are we likely to find?  Would the fileserver be able to support 30 to
>60 users?  What happens when we double in size?  

BU-CS.BU.EDU is now 3 SUN3/180 systems, each with 8MB, 16 terminal
ports (std SUN/MTI Mux), two Eagles (one tape, one with two ethernet
boards, two FPAs soon.) The others are (rarely) known as BUCSD.BU.EDU
and BUCSE.BU.EDU.

We typically have 12-20 users per system, usually around 40 across the
three (note, there can be more users than tty ports because we always
have a few, like me, who come in via rlogin or telnet.)

We're happy with the arrangement, it's the primary system for Computer
Science Research at Boston University.

All disks are cross-mounted via NFS and uniquely named (/usr1.../usr13.)
It doesn't matter to a user which system s/he logs into, s/he'll always
have the same home directory and the same view of the system.

We are running one ND SUN3/50 and one SUN3/75 with a shoe-box (71MB SCSI),
we're about to add two more ND SUN3/50s, I wouldn't want to push it too
far with all the interactive users but I suspect two to four (two on each
disk) per system will be fine for a total of six, of course when someone
gets a diskless node we lose a user so we could probably go further, or,
more likely, turn one of the three 180s into a file-server only, whatever.

The biggest problem to date is that if one of the systems goes down
unexpectedly the other two tend to hang because there will usually
be at least one user on each sys who's files are on the one that went
down. No big deal, either it's right back up or a little edit of fstab
and a re-boot (and an apology to affected users) fixes it all up. The
systems are reliable enough that this has not in fact been much of a
problem.

For a while we ran with 4MB awaiting a memory expansion board, don't
do it, 8MB is fine, 4MB can be awful but memory is cheap, I'd like to
put some more on tho it's hardly pressing right now.

If I were to do it today I would probably start with SUN3/280s, the
4MIP version, but this is really quite adequate, I'm an iron pig.

As I've said before, feel free to 'f @bu-cs.bu.edu', @bucsd.bu.edu,
@bucse.bu.edu [192.12.185.8, it's not in the htable yet] if you have
arpanet access, our finger daemon prints a cross between finger and 'w'.

Notes: Mail always goes to USER at BU-CS.BU.EDU and always appears to be
originating from there. We keep multiple copies of most binaries local
on each system as I believe this reduces NFS overhead a bit. One nice
thing is that if one system gets in trouble (or just needs a major
update) it's trivial for us to boot one server diskless off the other,
the disks being at that point accessible but un-mounted.

The nicest thing is that, as expected, it got the faculty started with
a (good) vanilla 4.2bsd system (which they wanted) and gives them time
to (easily) grow into their own workstations as grants etc come
through, thus promoting a reasonably uniform environment.

	-Barry Shein, Boston Univeristy