smiles@ferrari.nmc.ed.ray.com (Kevin Ruddy) (03/12/91)
We have a bunch of DS5000s here, and we'll probably be getting a lot more. After loading all the components we need for our environment, the 300Mb disks that we've been purchasing have little left over for users. The biggest space-hog is, of course, the /usr partition. But it's duplicated for each machine, even though all the machines use the same stuff. This was all done to make diskless workstations work effectively, I think. DEC doesn't provide an easy way to "share" portions of /usr. For example, rather than having fifty copies of the manual pages, we'd like two or three, and share them -- using the automounter, perhaps -- amongst the machines. But there's no standard method of doing that. Yes, I could do it without a problem, but I want to keep these configurations as vanilla as humanly possible. I want to keep the localizations on the machines to be a minimum, so that upgrades will go smoothly. The only alternative DEC provides (well, almost provides) is to let the machines run with a read-only /usr partition mounted from a server. This could be a reasonable solution for us, and it would save quite a bit of disk space. About 11Gb to be exact ... What I would like to know is this: how will network-mounting /usr affect performance of the DECstations? Are binaries much slower to load (slow enough to really notice)? What happens if the server goes down? Will it pick up as soon as the server is back up, or will the client machine be in such a state that it needs to be rebooted also? I would really appreciate anything people could tell me anything regarding this issue -- benefits and hazards I have no clue about, any experiences with diskless workstations or anyone who's tried such a configuration ... Waiting for 4.2, Kevin Ruddy smiles@ferrari.nmc.ed.ray.com