From owner-freebsd-hackers Mon May 25 08:40:09 1998
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Date: Mon, 25 May 1998 11:39:33 -0400 (EDT)
From: Robert Watson <robert@cyrus.watson.org>
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Reply-To: Robert Watson <robert+freebsd@cyrus.watson.org>
To: patl@Phoenix.Volant.ORG
cc: Terry Lambert <tlambert@primenet.com>, freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject: Re: NFS -vs- swap (was SIGDANGER)
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On Wed, 29 Apr 1998 patl@Phoenix.Volant.ORG wrote:
> > Having worked in an environment where most of engineering was running
> > on dataless machines with local swap and local auxillary disk, but
> > running most applciations from a central server (much easier to maintain
> > 40+ engineers this way), and having had 40+ people become unproductive
> > while the NFS server reboots... well, it became a design issue for me.
>
> This sounds like a good environment for a cachefs on top of the
> appropriate NFS mounts.
Although there are consistency issues there. Coda provides essentially
the same service as it caches on disk in its Vice Cache, but may be more
aware of the consistency constraints. We're still investigating the
possibilities of Network Computers and Coda -- it seems like one could
almost just have a kernel + boot utils and a large cache, and live ones
entire life that way. Many machines at CMU already pull most of their
local/ binaries out of AFS. With AFS, new executions start blocking as
they can't contact the server, but with disconnected operation in Coda,
NC's make a lot of sense.
I'll be looking at porting the RPC2 package Coda relies on to Java
sometime in the next few months -- having access in Java might be pretty
useful.
Robert N Watson
----
Carnegie Mellon University http://www.cmu.edu/
Trusted Information Systems http://www.tis.com/
SafePort Network Services http://www.safeport.com/
robert@fledge.watson.org http://www.watson.org/~robert/
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