ddean@rain.andrew.cmu.edu (Drew Dean) (05/10/91)
In article <12049@mentor.cc.purdue.edu> asg@sage.cc.purdue.edu (The Grand Master) writes: >We also have it here at GE where each person who has a workstation >can still log into anny workstation and be able to access his disk without >having to do mounting all over the place. If I want to get to a directory >/tmp on the system a294 I do cd //a294/tmp - no problem. Uh, guys -- From this description, I'd be willing to bet that GE has a network of Apollos. Apollo has a network root concept, where each machine has its name as an entry in the // directory, which is above the local root directory. Several daemons (try) to keep this information consistent across the network. This appears to be a legacy of Aegis, Apollo's proprietary OS (before they merged it with Unix). Aegis may or may not be a "good" OS; that's not at issue here. It was built for distributed workstations, though, from the start. I'd note that CMU RFS (not related at all to AT&T RFS) uses /.. in the same way. In these types of remote filesystems, the mounts are implicit instead of explicit; again whether or not this is a good idea isn't relevant. Conclusion: this has nothing to do with NFS and/or automounters. To add more flamage: the Sequent's I've heard about are either NS32x32 or i386 based machines, ie. each processor is < 10 MIPS (meaningless indicators of performance :-)). They also seem to cost > $100,000 (and get a lot higher than that with 40 CPU's). Considering that HP will sell you a 50+ MIPS workstation (uniprocessor) for ~ $25K (with disks, etc), I really doubt that an equal dollar amount of Sequents will buy more usuable performance than workstations. Tell me this: If I'm running a large application that hasn't been parallelized (so I can only use 1 processor), say Mathematica, which is going to be faster ? [I don't think Mathematica actually runs on either platform, so substitute the package of your choice.] Note that this shouldn't be construed as large multi-processor bashing, because those machine have there place, too (big databases come to mind). Just in terms of providing MIPS to people, cheap workstations are hard to beat. -- Drew Dean Drew_Dean@rain.andrew.cmu.edu [CMU provides my net connection; they don't necessarily agree with me.]
cgd@ocf.Berkeley.EDU (Chris G. Demetriou) (05/10/91)
In article <12975@pt.cs.cmu.edu> ddean@rain.andrew.cmu.edu (Drew Dean) writes: In article <12049@mentor.cc.purdue.edu> asg@sage.cc.purdue.edu (The Grand Master) writes: >We also have it here at GE where each person who has a workstation >can still log into anny workstation and be able to access his disk without >having to do mounting all over the place. If I want to get to a directory >/tmp on the system a294 I do cd //a294/tmp - no problem. Uh, guys -- From this description, I'd be willing to bet that GE has a network of Apollos. Apollo has a network root concept, where each machine has its name as an entry in the // directory, which is above the local root directory. Several daemons (try) to keep this information consistent across the network. This appears to be a legacy of Aegis, Apollo's proprietary OS (before they merged it with Unix). Aegis may or may not be a "good" OS; that's not at issue here. It was built for distributed workstations, though, from the start. I'd note that CMU RFS (not related at all to AT&T RFS) uses /.. in the same way. In these types of remote filesystems, the mounts are implicit instead of explicit; again whether or not this is a good idea isn't relevant. sorry i didn't read this before i posted the previous... Apollos are interesting creatures... if anyone can break *ANY* single account on those machines, they can *EASILY* toast the entire network... wanna know how? rbak and wbak (especially old versions...) are great for restoring Aegis suid files... (actually, if you write with an old version of wbak, it doesn't *MATTER* what version of rbak you use...) <sigh> that, and there are millions of other ways to do stuff that most people don't know about... cgd