[alt.next] optical disk? diskless? distribution?

mrd@sun.soe.clarkson.edu (Michael DeCorte) (10/16/88)

3 questions,

1) the optical disk, is the WORM or WMRM?  I thought WMRM was a few
years off.

2) Will there be a server available or does the NeXT have enough IO
bandwidth to handle a couple of FAST hd's?  Yes this sound like I want
to turn it into a sun, but this could be a system adminstrators
nightmare.  If you tend to use many different workstations, you are
going to have to NFS mount all of them together and this sounds slow.
Also updating software would be a nightmare.  "I just recomplied TeX
for the NeXT's, now I have to copy it to 50 optical disks".

3) I want one!  How can Clarkson U. get on the order list?


--

Michael DeCorte // (315)268-2292 // P.O. Box 652, Potsdam, NY 13676
Internet mrd@sun.soe.clarkson.edu  // Bitnet   mrd@clutx.bitnet        
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bob@allosaur.cis.ohio-state.edu (Bob Sutterfield) (10/18/88)

In article <MRD.88Oct15140913@sun.soe.clarkson.edu> mrd@sun.soe.clarkson.edu (Michael DeCorte) writes:
>2) Will there be a server available or does the NeXT have enough IO
>bandwidth to handle a couple of FAST hd's?  Yes this sound like I
>want to turn it into a sun, but this could be a system adminstrators
>nightmare.

Either use the commodity NFS server (Sun, Pyramid, whatever) that you
already have lying around; or string some Wren-N's on the SCSI port of
a NeXT cube and configure your own NeXT server from one member of your
cluster.  The SCSI chip has a lot of steam (did I hear 4MB/s around
here somewhere?)

The question remains: What version of NFS does NeXT already have?
Have they got diskless NFS booting?  How soon will they have the
automounter and all the other nifties in the version shipping with
SunOS 4.0?  Has Sun even started shipping source to their developer
source licensees?
-=-
Zippy sez,								--Bob
Can I have an IMPULSE ITEM instead?