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From: bzs@bu-cs.BU.EDU (Barry Shein)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions,comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: chown (was: at files and permissions)
Message-ID: <34515@bu-cs.BU.EDU>
Date: 11 Jul 89 19:19:03 GMT
References: <1894@cbnewsh.ATT.COM> <669@lzaz.ATT.COM> <8072@bsu-cs.bsu.edu> <34422@bu-cs.BU.EDU> <4926@ficc.uu.net>
Organization: Boston U. Comp. Sci.
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From: peter@ficc.uu.net (Peter da Silva)
>Have a look at mainframes, where you generally have lots of disk farms.
>They have automatic mechanisms to roll stuff off to tape, and bring it back.
>If it's handled automatically (i.e., they can't dump on a tech aide for
>following orders), then politics isn't any more a problem than with quotas.
>
>This works a *lot* better.

Agreed (I assume you're referring to systems like IBM's MSS) but so
far these systems are not cheap, even for modest systems they can
easily cost as much as the rest of the system.

Ultimately of course there's some fundamental law at work here where
if you don't have controls of any sort the archive system could become
the bottleneck (no system I've seen takes less than many seconds to
handle an archival restoral request.)

The other problem is that you've now overcommitted you disk resources
so the possibility exists that some mix of users who want to work
today can't because the sum of their archive roll-offs don't fit.

Anyhow, just chatting.

>And big systems need better mechanisms than quotas.

Being as a quota system isn't a whole lot more than managing a few
integers I'd be curious to hear what would be needed to improve the
current system (sincerely, not a snide remark!)
-- 
	-Barry Shein

Software Tool & Die, Purveyors to the Trade
1330 Beacon Street, Brookline, MA 02146, (617) 739-0202
Internet: bzs@skuld.std.com
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