From owner-freebsd-chat Mon Nov 30 05:33:40 1998 Return-Path: Received: (from majordom@localhost) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) id FAA26509 for freebsd-chat-outgoing; Mon, 30 Nov 1998 05:33:40 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from owner-freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG) Received: from dingo.cdrom.com (ppp7.portal.net.au [202.12.71.107]) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id FAA26504 for ; Mon, 30 Nov 1998 05:33:34 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from mike@dingo.cdrom.com) Received: from dingo.cdrom.com (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by dingo.cdrom.com (8.9.1/8.8.8) with ESMTP id AAA00385; Sun, 29 Nov 1998 00:43:40 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from mike@dingo.cdrom.com) Message-Id: <199811290843.AAA00385@dingo.cdrom.com> X-Mailer: exmh version 2.0.2 2/24/98 To: "Jason C. Wells" cc: FreeBSD-chat Subject: Re: Diskless Workstations In-reply-to: Your message of "Wed, 18 Nov 1998 23:28:40 PST." Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Date: Sun, 29 Nov 1998 00:43:40 -0800 From: Mike Smith Sender: owner-freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.org > Sometime ago I asked folks about NC's. Now I am back. Once again I am > armed with just enough info to be dangerous. Flee! > Would you recommend using diskless workstations? Would you rather be shot? > I have read what the vendor's have to say but I would like to hear your > advice. Yes and no. There are pros and cons to both arrangements; the basic tradeoff is centralisation vs. performance. > It seems that running diskless has a serious advantage of using the same > disk space for all of the programs that all the users need. 100baseT can > compete with UW-SCSI bit for bit on bandwidth. No it can't. And NFS doesn't compete for latency. But many users don't need that sort of filesystem throughput. > The only disadvantage that I can see is that the organization depends > utterly on the network and the fileserver. I think that any organization > that depends heavily on networking is stuck with this anyway. Indeed. You can address some of the performance issues with dataless, rather than diskless, workstations (local OS copy, local config replicated on a regular basis from a master server, apps and user data mounted via NFS). -- \\ Sometimes you're ahead, \\ Mike Smith \\ sometimes you're behind. \\ mike@smith.net.au \\ The race is long, and in the \\ msmith@freebsd.org \\ end it's only with yourself. \\ msmith@cdrom.com To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message