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Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.anu.edu.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!news.mira.net.au!yarrina.connect.com.au!news.mel.connect.com.au!munnari.OZ.AU!news.hawaii.edu!ames!agate!howland.reston.ans.net!gatech!taco.cc.ncsu.edu!crazytrain.eos.ncsu.edu!not-for-mail From: kpneal@eos.ncsu.edu (Kevin P. Neal) Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.netbsd.misc Subject: Re: diskless client Date: 6 Feb 1996 10:37:47 GMT Organization: North Carolina State University Lines: 39 Message-ID: <4f7b1r$ed9@taco.cc.ncsu.edu> References: <4epmp7$6t3@ntucsz.csie.ntu.edu.tw> <4eusir$fql@panix2.panix.com> <4f3qda$qom@lestat.nas.nasa.gov> NNTP-Posting-Host: crazytrain.eos.ncsu.edu X-Newsreader: TIN [UNIX 1.3 950824BETA PL0] Jason R Thorpe (thorpej@lestat.nas.nasa.gov) wrote: : In article <4eusir$fql@panix2.panix.com>, : Thor Lancelot Simon <tls@rek.tjls.com> wrote: : : >I suppose you know that you really, really, REALLY want to have a local disk : >at least to swap to? Considering what small disks can be had for these : >days ($80 will get you a perfectly good 100MB disk to swap to) there's hardly : >any reason to go pure diskless, unless of course you _want_ to lose. : : I don't think that's completely fair to diskless configurations :-) Many : sysadmin's agree that one of the easiest to manage "glorified X terminal" : configurations is a diskless one. : Here at NCSU our machines have a local disk. We have lots of machines, varying from Decstation 2100s (which are going away quickly) to Sparc 5's to HP 9000/7xx (forgot which). All of them have a local disk, with local swap, tmp, and enough root to start afs and mount /usr. The idea being that the machines boot themselves, start AFS, mount /usr, and then start things like X. This way if the power goes off you don't have a huge number of machines killing some boot server on startup. It also means that there are no "boot" servers. Just AFS servers. We have a few "install" servers, but those are not needed very often in normal usage. This might seem like an expensive way to do things, but we have about 30,000 people to provide computer access to. And the system works very well. The only problem I have with it is that PPP through the school blows chunks. Then again, with my 3rd-party providor I can go home to visit my family (about a 2-hr drive) and still dial up to the Internet with no long-distance or 800# charges. Fine by me. -- XCOMM -------------------------------------------------------- XCOMM Kevin P. Neal, Sophomore CSC/CPE kpneal@eos.ncsu.edu XCOMM North Carolina State University kevinneal@bix.com XCOMM --------------------------------------------------------