eho@clarity.princeton.edu (Eric Ho) (02/23/90)
I'm not sure if Sun wants to introduce a somewhat hybrid sort of diskless/dataless clients into suninstall(8). See, the problem with diskless clients is that it makes the entire configuration hard to scale up. I mean, for people want to run relatively large (CPU & memory) jobs on their desktops, you'll need to allocate 25~60meg of swap per client and if you've 10 of these, you'll already have consumed a large chunk of space on the fileserver. And this means that you'll need to get more disk space for the fileserver -- I'm not sure this is the most economical route to go though since SMD/IPI disks tends to be more expensive. Besides, you generate a lot of network traffic when everyone is cranking up their load. In this situation, making every node to be a dataless client is the way to go. But it is a hassle to setup and more difficult to manage since each dataless client has its root partition on local disk. What would be nice is to make diskless clients swap locally and have temporaries like (/tmp, /var/spool/mqueue, /var/tmp, ...) reside on local disks. This way, you don't have to worry about allocating large chunk of space on the fileservers for client swapping and it should reduce net traffic quite a bit. And you can manage these nodes as conveniently as before (since each client's root only takes up to 2meg, it can scale up easily and besides, you can rehack each client's root so that they all *share* a common root except for some files that are really machine-specific (e.g. /etc/rc.boot, ..etc...) and you'll basically get everything for free). I've just turned a dataless 3/75 into a pseudo-diskless 3/75 and it works pretty well so far (it has a 71meg shoebox attached). I just thought that Sun should provide this option in suninstall(8). Eric Ho Princeton University eho@clarity.princeton.edu
gary@uunet.uu.net (Gary Cattelino) (03/03/90)
I agree with eho@clarity.princeton.edu. The diskless/dataless hybrid
provides a good balence between performance and system administration. I
have a new Sun 4/490 on order and plan to setup all the Sparc 1
workstations as pseudo-diskless clients. Almost all the Sparc 1s have two
internal disks. I am trying to figure out what things to put on the local
disk and what to put on the fileserver. My plan is to give each
workstation 50 MB of local swap and a local /tmp (about 20 MB sound
right?). I have been thinking about a local /var, but I'm not sure how
that would work out. Keeping /var on the fileserver has administration
advantages. Any thoughts?
Gary A. Cattelino Unocal Science & Technology Division
Phone: (714) 528-7201 x2715 376 S. Valencia Avenue
UUCP: uunet!zardoz!cerveza!gary Brea, CA 92621
sun!sunkist!cerveza!gary INTERNET: gary@unocal.COMbeaulieu@uunet.uu.net (Larry Beaulieu) (03/03/90)
> What would be nice is to make diskless clients swap locally and have > temporaries like (/tmp, /var/spool/mqueue, /var/tmp, ...) reside on local > disks. DEC specificially allows a diskless configuration witl local page/swap on their workstations - both VMS and Ultrix - as a 'standard' feature. The method they use is to define the client nodes on the server as diskless, but to include support for the disk(s) in the kernel and then to specify the local disk as the page/swap device, using something like: config vmunix swap on sd6b in the configuration file(s) for the client(s). You could probably prepare the local disk for use by /tmp and /var on your Suns by running suninstall on the client as a diskless node and completing the portion where it prepares the local disk for use, exiting suninstall, and then using newfs to make the raw partitions usable, after which you'd change /etc/fstab to reflect the new locations of /var and /tmp. Personally, I'm not sure the additional work to put /tmp and /var would be worth it if you have a lot of clients to set up, although local page and swap is REALLY nice; we use it on the client workstations on our MI VAXcluster. I hope Sun makes this a standard option in suninstall. While I'm at it, I hope they MODIFY THEIR KERNEL so that you can specify multiple swap partitions in the configuration file without having to deal with swapon, LIKE YOU CAN DO ON ULTRIX (and like the 4.0.3 documentation CLAIMS you can do). Sometimes DEC does do something right. Larry Beaulieu ...uunet!gca!beaulieu SMTS/Software Engineer GCA Corporation, "Live to step, step to live..." Andover, MA