roy@alanine.phri.nyu.edu (Roy Smith) (01/18/90)
A few months ago, I asked for peoples' opinions on the Jasmine
DirectServe. A got a bunch of responses, mostly along the lines of "it looks
good, but it's still vaporware, so I don't have any real data yet". One or
two people reported generally good experiences with the JDS in an earlier
incarnation from another company.
Now that it's been shipping for a while, I'm repeating my query. If
you've got a DirectServe, I'd like to hear about your experiences with it.
From the specs, it looks like a great way to get an AppleShare server set up,
assuming the product works as well as it's supposed to. I know all about
Jasmine's recent business problems; I'd appreciate if people would try and
factor out the technical issues from the general "dealing with Jasmine, Inc."
problems. We'd probably get the server from Jasmine but the disk elsewhere.
If you know of any good alternatives to the DirectServe, I'd be
interested in hearing about them too. Buying an SE-30 to dedicate as a file
server seems like an expensive way to go. Various people have suggested that
CPU speed on the server is not really important, especially over localtalk
speeds. More important are fast disks and a big ram cache (this is certainly
true of ethernet NFS servers), and that we might get along fine with a
Mac-Plus as a server; any opinions on that? We currently run the CAP printer
stuff, but not aufs. Setting up papif and lwserv was not trivial and a few
half-hearted attempts at getting aufs running have failed. Do people really
run aufs in production environments? Even if it works, I'm not sure we would
go with aufs anyway; one of our goals is to not have the macs depend on our
Sun file servers for essential services.
--
Roy Smith, Public Health Research Institute
455 First Avenue, New York, NY 10016
roy@alanine.phri.nyu.edu -OR- {att,philabs,cmcl2,rutgers,hombre}!phri!roy
"My karma ran over my dogma"david_islander_hughes@cup.portal.com (01/20/90)
Initially we used an SE (1 meg) with a built-in 20 meg hard drive on our apple system here at the newspaper. It was slow. I determined that since our staff had grown and our mac population had also more than doubled we needed a bigger HD. So, I obtained a 100 Meg Jasmine DD and attached it to a plus. The SE's CPU speed was needed for faster pagemaker pagination. Lo and behold the server's speed was more than doubled on the network. I swear by Jasmine. It has run for four months 24 hours a day (except for our island's periodic power outages) without a whimper. I recommend them without reservation. Dave Hughes Mas systems manager/ news editor Guam Tribune Agana Guam (Check out our news from the islands on portal)
jlo@otc.otca.oz (John O_Neill) (01/21/90)
For a highly readable evaluation of Direct Serve, see the article in Nov/Dec 89 Connections. It concludes that Jasmine have a lot left to do with this product before it could be recommended. Issues such as backup and the lack of an ethernet interface are cause for concern. John O'Neill Apple Computer Australia
6600bike@hub.UUCP (Puneet Pasrich) (01/22/90)
From article <1990Jan17.201058.24959@phri.nyu.edu>, by roy@alanine.phri.nyu.edu (Roy Smith): > > A few months ago, I asked for peoples' opinions on the Jasmine > DirectServe. A got a bunch of responses, mostly along the lines of "it looks > good, but it's still vaporware, so I don't have any real data yet". One or > two people reported generally good experiences with the JDS in an earlier > incarnation from another company. > > Now that it's been shipping for a while, I'm repeating my query. If > you've got a DirectServe, I'd like to hear about your experiences with it. Well, I own one (anyway, the district I work for does). It's cool. Now, that seems a lame thing to say. but it really is. I have to say that it was a Major Pain-In-The-Ass to set up the original server (an SE). When we got the DirectServe, it took me about five minutes to set it up. The only hitch was that I had to back up my SErver and the restore it to the DS, except it was via Appletalk, not SCSI. That slowed things down temporarily. The nicest thing about the DS is that it doesn't crash (in the month we've had it, it's only died twice, whereas the SErver goes down every day. If anyone knows why, I'd like to know. So far, I believe it's AppleShare's problem, and not the hardware itself. 2.5megs. 107meg drive.) Also, DS is easy to maintain. All I do is switch the hard drive on, and then the server itself and away she goes!) As for problems: 1) The read files, read folders, write permissions go I don't think DS follows them. In Finder (the Appl, not the system) the permissions are followed. But with something like On Cue, I've been able to access APPLs that guests are not supposed to (while I was logged on as guest). 2) Software ain't great. But then most of the stuff's in ROMs anyway. The Admin disk is sufficient, but I think Jasmine could have put something on it, that Apple does not. 3) No standard SCSI hookups. For me, that means no CD publishing. That was almost the reason I sent DS back. I didn't, primarily because it's so much faster and more reliable than our SE. Oh well, that's my story. Tell me what you decide! ___________________________________________________________ |Puneet Pasrich | Internet: 6600bike@ucsbuxa.ucsb.edu | |Karate Kid | Bitnet: 6600bike@ucsbuxa.bitnet | |'Just do it!' | |
roy@phri.nyu.edu (Roy Smith) (01/22/90)
In <3680@hub.UUCP> 6600bike@hub.UUCP (Puneet Pasrich) writes: > No standard SCSI hookups. For me, that means no CD publishing. I don't understand. If it doesn't have a SCSI port, how do you hook disks up to it? -- Roy Smith, Public Health Research Institute 455 First Avenue, New York, NY 10016 roy@alanine.phri.nyu.edu -OR- {att,philabs,cmcl2,rutgers,hombre}!phri!roy "My karma ran over my dogma"