george@cs.purdue.EDU (Michael J. George) (10/13/90)
I posted this question to news a few days ago: Does anyone know if NeXT has a diskless version of the momochrome slab? If so, I also ask what the educational price of the workstation is. If anyone knows, reply by mail, and I'll post it to the news. And in case there are any people with the same question I had, here is a summary of the replies I got: ---------------------------------------------- I asked the same question of a NeXT sales rep, and they said " no diskless machines." The reason is that the difference in price between a diskless machine and a machine with the quantum 105 HD was so small that they preferred to have a HD on every machine. This reduces network load, but makes configuration a bit harder, from a sysadmin point of view... ---------------------------------------------- There probably will not be a diskless slab, for a couple reasons: 1) 105M Quantum drives in quantity are _cheap_. 2) An '040 needs swap space more than an '030. If you run an '040 without a local swapdisk, you probably won't get much more performance out of it than the old '030. So it'd then be useless. In Unix, running a diskless node with less than 100M hard drive or less than 8M RAM is a mistake. At this point, I would consider the entry- level NeXTStation to be the diskless workstation, since the disk is for local storage (swapfile, /tmp, /NextApps, etc), while you still need the network to store files on, and to hold user accounts. Also, our NeXT rep said "No diskless workstations". ---------------------------------------------- No, the 105 MB slab is the low price machine. ---------------------------------------------- Michael George george@cs.purdue.edu
henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer) (10/16/90)
In article <12054@medusa.cs.purdue.edu> george@lisa.cs.purdue.edu (Michael J. George) writes: >In Unix, running a diskless node with less than 100M hard drive or less >than 8M RAM is a mistake... Sigh. There was a time when you could run Unix in 0.5MB and use the rest of that 8MB to hold the entire distribution, with sources and documentation. Yes, Unix has improved since then... but by that big a ratio? -- "...the i860 is a wonderful source | Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology of thesis topics." --Preston Briggs | henry@zoo.toronto.edu utzoo!henry