eho@bogey.princeton.edu (Eric Y.W. Ho) (05/24/89)
I was thinking the other day why Sun made their servers also as fileservers as well. I mean if they can decouple the file serving part from other services then I think that we may have a more fault-tolerant & more flexible environment. The decoupling I'm talking about is actually a subsystem that understands nothing but file/disk related things/requests. I think that current Sun servers takes on too much -- sometimes they act as terminal, cpu, file, ..etc... servers all in one and when the server crash, everything (at least its clients) are frozen. If you've a subsystem that only do storing & retrieving things to/from disks then it probably will be less likely to crash and because you store all system binaries/libraries/source/database files on disks, the clients may still be able to function normally when the server is down (assuming that various system services -- e.g. yp, is replicated elsewhere on the net -- probably need some reworking at the kernel to make the clients not to "stick so close" to their primary server). This way one can easily reconfigure one's desktop on-the-fly and one can reboot the server (e.g. doing experiments on the server) anytime one wanted. By decoupling the fileserver from the server, one can also make a mirror image for even more fault-tolerance. This way even if everything around you is crashing, you can still do things as normal on your diskless or dataless desktop. Eric Ho Princeton Cognitive Science Lab., Princeton University email = eho@phoenix.princeton.edu phone = 609-987-2819 (x2987) regards. -eric-
eho@bogey.princeton.edu (Eric Y.W. Ho) (05/24/89)
Date: Wed, 24 May 89 12:51:47 EDT From: Phil Ritzenthaler <phil@bashful.cgrg.ohio-state.edu> Subject: tcsh and GNU Emacs > Can anyone tell me where I can get hold of an executable for tcsh for a > Sun3 running SunOS4.0? I grabbed the SunOS3 version from uunet, but Gnu > Emacs has trouble getting the working directory from it. It always > thinks you're in whatever directory you were in when you started up the > tcsh, i.e. if I start a tcsh in /home/russell, cd into a subdirectory and > type "emacs test.txt", emacs thinks the filename is > "/home/russell/test.txt". Sorry about the previous message . . . New Sun OS$ (the $ was a typo, but sometimes now I thinks it's fact . . .) sets an evnironment variable PWD that tcsh does NOT use. I ran into this problem too. The most unelegant solution I found is to place: unsetenv PWD in my .cshrc Phil Ritzenthaler The Advanced Computing Center for the Arts & Design (ACCAD) Systems Manager The Ohio State University UUCP: ...!{pyramid,killer}!grumpy.cgrg.ohio-state.edu!phil ARPA: phil@grumpy.cgrg.ohio-state.edu "Research is the process by which a loose brick is found through pounding one's head against a wall." -- Anonymous