Date: Sun, 29 Nov 1998 00:43:40 -0800 From: Mike Smith <mike@smith.net.au> To: "Jason C. Wells" <jcwells@u.washington.edu> Cc: FreeBSD-chat <freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: Re: Diskless Workstations Message-ID: <199811290843.AAA00385@dingo.cdrom.com> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Wed, 18 Nov 1998 23:28:40 PST." <Pine.BSF.4.05.9811182318020.4361-100000@s8-37-26.student.washington.edu>
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> 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
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