*BSD News Article 41746


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From: a09878@giant.rsoft.bc.ca (Curt Sampson)
Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.development,comp.os.386bsd.development
Subject: Re: SAMBA and NETWARE mounting
Date: 28 Jan 95 05:36:45 GMT
Organization: MIND LINK! Communications Corp.
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wes@indirect.com (Barnacle Wes) writes:

>Curt Sampson (a09878@giant.rsoft.bc.ca) wrote:
>: NetWare has the one great advantage that it's *very* fast at slinging
>: files about. I'd like to see anybody run 150 CAD users on a 64 MB 486/33 
>: using NFS.

>We had 15 - 18 programmers on UNIX and VMS workstations...

I'll admit that each of your 18 programmers probably generated a
higher load on your servers than our average CAD user. But more than
*five* times the load? I doubt it. It's not unusual for drawings
around here to be a megabyte or more, and the maximum time an operator
goes without transfering the entire file across the network (to load
or save) is twenty minutes.

>...our two big "servers" comprised a DECstation 5000/200 and
>a SPARCstation 10/512...

Are you trying to say that these two servers put together are about
equivalant to an 33 MHz EISA 486 with 64 MB of RAM? In that case,
would you care to make a hardware swap with me? I'll even throw in a
couple hundred dollars to make it really worth your while.

>The combination of NFS and automounter in that situation was one of
>the most elegant programming environments I've ever seen. 

I won't argue with that. It's certainly more elegant that DOS machines
and NetWare servers.

>Of course, all we were doing was using GCC (from an NFS mount) to
>compile and link 4 - 6 Meg Motif and Galaxy applications (with the
>libraries on NFS as well); nothing challenging like loading a CAD
>drawing.  ;^)

Yes, I too have found it quite a lot more challenging to run a program
from an NFS-mounted drive than to run a program from a NetWare-mapped
drive. (:-/ for the sarcasm-impared.)

If you want a challenge, go get MS-Windows running on a network,
holding all the user configuration files on the network, adapting to
the hardware on the machine it's currently running on, and
auto-installing any programs the user runs. How you can consider
setting up a system designed from the beginning to network well more
"challenging" than attempting to kludge and patch a system that
resists and breaks networks at every turn is beyond me.

>And a 486dx2/66 NetWare file server *with*
>a fast ethernet card, fast SCSI disks, and lots of RAM is still
>not as fast at serving files as our old, trusty DECstation 5000/200...

Are you comparing this with individual workstation measurements or
when the server is loaded down by fifty workstations or more. No
individual DOS workstation ever does well under NetWare; their drivers
and NCP protocol stupidites limit I/O speed to about 500 K/sec under
the very best of conditions. (The same hardware running, say, NetBSD
will do much, much better.)

cjs
--
Curt Sampson  a09878@giant.rsoft.bc.ca		Opinions are mine,
Fluor Daniel Wright, Ltd. 604 488 2226		not Fluor Daniel's.
1075 W. Georgia Street
Vancouver, B.C., V6E 4M7	 	De gustibus, aut bene aut nihil.