tr@samadams.princeton.edu (Tom Reingold) (03/01/90)
Neil Gorsuch talks about how using an ethernet-based terminal server can eat up your net bandwidth. My understanding is that the packets for rlogin and telnet are so few and small that they are insignificant compared with NFS. Am I wrong? -- tr@samadams.princeton.edu
emv@math.lsa.umich.edu (Edward Vielmetti) (03/01/90)
In article <24573@princeton.Princeton.EDU> tr@samadams.princeton.edu (Tom Reingold) writes:
Neil Gorsuch talks about how using an ethernet-based terminal server
can eat up your net bandwidth. My understanding is that the
packets for rlogin and telnet are so few and small that they are
insignificant compared with NFS. Am I wrong?
Neil Gorsuch is selling a product which competes with
ethernet-based terminal servers, and his opinions on
the subject should be considered in that light.
NFS will eat up your net well before telnet traffic.
--Edneil@uninet.cpd.com (Neil Gorsuch) (03/01/90)
In article <EMV.90Feb28121751@duby.math.lsa.umich.edu> emv@math.lsa.umich.edu (Edward Vielmetti) writes: >In article <24573@princeton.Princeton.EDU> tr@samadams.princeton.edu (Tom Reingold) writes: > Neil Gorsuch talks about how using an ethernet-based terminal server > can eat up your net bandwidth. My understanding is that the > packets for rlogin and telnet are so few and small that they are > insignificant compared with NFS. Am I wrong? >Neil Gorsuch is selling a product which competes with >ethernet-based terminal servers, and his opinions on >the subject should be considered in that light. I'm Neil Gorsuch 8-). While I love to sell product (entrepreneurial types tend to be that way), I posted the original article to provide a counterpoint to the "you need a big EXPENSIVE computer to handle multiple users" and "you need a big EXPENSIVE workstation to be a server for desktop workstations" attitudes which I find somewhat repugnant. Sometimes, big EXPENSIVE computers are better, sometimes they're not. I would just stress that it is very much worth people's time to investigate and consider non-traditional approaches. Especially considering the wave of under $5000, double digit MIPS workstations just over the horizon. And don't let the people that sell the EXPENSIVE computers be your information source for "small" computer capabilities 8-), or the other way around. If you noticed, the system that I proposed would work equally well whether the terminals were hanging off the ethernet or elsewhere. "Elsewhere" just offers a some technical advantages and some cost savings. My postings are an argument for "smaller is sometimes VERY cost effective", not an argument for "elsewhere". >NFS will eat up your net well before telnet traffic. It depends what you're doing. If you have a bunch of diskless clients hanging off one ethernet, NFS will almost certainly dominate. If, however, you have 1 or 2 large machines with their own disks and a 100 or so users logged in through the ethernet, as was being discussed, there should be almost no NFS traffic, but a lot of character traffic. From what I have been told, with TCP/IP encapsulation, about the best that a single ethernet can do is about 150,000 actual characters a second. If you have 100 people doing editing, with a screen update every 10 seconds, you get 100*24*80/10=19200 characters per second, which is a noticable, but hardly crippling, fraction of the ethernet TCP/IP capability. I know of one case where many, many diskless client workstations are contemplated that will have 32 users each running a single special application system that involves a lot of screen updating. Since they are going to put about 15 diskless clients per server, each server's private ethernet leg will require 15*32*24*80/10=92160 characters per second which would be almost impossible to have co-exist with the NFS read/writes associated with 480 users. Whereas, if you have the character data transfers "elsewhere", it works out very nicely, and enables a BIG cost savings in computer costs. And on that note illustrating an advantage of my particular technology, I will conclude (probably not too many of you have made it to this point 8-) by saying that no one technology is better than others. Particular technologies and strategies will be better and/or save you money in particular cases, and it behooves system designers to be open-minded and consider uncommon configurations. -- Neil Gorsuch INTERNET: neil@uninet.cpd.com UUCP: uunet!zardoz!neil MAIL: 1209 E. Warner, Santa Ana, CA, USA, 92705 PHONE: +1 714 546 1100 Uninet, a division of Custom Product Design, Inc. FAX: +1 714 546 3726 AKA: root, security-request, uuasc-request, postmaster, usenet, news