jac@sundance.llnl.gov (James Crotinger) (10/08/90)
I recently acquired a disk for my formerly diskless SS1 and I am trying to decide how to reconfigure my system. Our first inclination was to move swap and /tmp to the local disk, leaving the root file system on the server so that it would be backed up regularly. However the Sun documentation doesn't mention using such a configuration and I'm wondering if there is a reason. Are there advantages to having the root file system local? In particular I can imagine that there might be performance advantages. Are there? James A. Crotinger Lawrence Livermore Nat'l Lab // The above views jac@gandalf.llnl.gov P.O. Box 808; L-630 \\ // are mine and are not (415) 422-0259 Livermore CA 94550 \\/ necessarily those of LLNL.
katz@rpal.com (11/01/90)
In article <1990Oct7.223836.28419@rice.edu> jac@sundance.llnl.gov (James Crotinger) writes: > I recently acquired a disk for my formerly diskless SS1 and I am trying to > decide how to reconfigure my system. Our first inclination was to move > swap and /tmp to the local disk, leaving the root file system on the > server so that it would be backed up regularly. However the Sun > documentation doesn't mention using such a configuration and I'm wondering > if there is a reason. Are there advantages to having the root file system > local? In particular I can imagine that there might be performance > advantages. Are there? Actually, at one point some people found that access files on a fileserver can be faster than accessing local disk. This is because fileservers often have faster, more efficient disks that offset the network delay. Sun does not support having only swap on a local disk, but this is the way all of our machines run. We believe that this is a nice compromise between efficiency and system administration effort. I want all of our file to be on aa fileserver which is backed up nightly, etc. However, I do not want to load our net with lots of paging traffic. We achieve the above by building a custom kermel with the following config line (OS4.1): config vmunix root on type nfs swap on type spec sd0c Morry Katz Rockwell Science Center administrator@rpal.com (machine administration issues) katz@rpal.com (other)