Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!iuvax!uxc.cso.uiuc.edu!news From: dorner@pequod.cso.uiuc.edu (Steve Dorner) Newsgroups: comp.sys.next Subject: Re: Student's view of NeXT marketing plan Message-ID: <1989Aug8.145759.7382@uxc.cso.uiuc.edu> Date: 8 Aug 89 14:57:59 GMT References: <4866@tank.uchicago.edu> Reply-To: dorner@pequod.cso.uiuc.edu (Steve Dorner) Organization: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Lines: 35 In article J Greely >... > 256 meg makes a nice data disk, but it is sub-optimal as a system >disk... > ... The second problem is space: a bootable optical disk under >0.9 has barely 18 meg free, nowhere near enough for my "computing >world"... > > If I were putting together a cluster of NeXTs here, they would be >diskless clients of a non-NeXT server, hooked into the department >network. A few standalone machines for casual use wouldn't be a bad >idea, but they would not be networked to the rest... There is a lot here to agree with. I don't think allowing students to boot from their own optical disks is a good idea at all, at least unless and until NeXT does something Kerberros-like, so that security is not a problem. On the other hand, an optical disk AS A DATA DISK has a heck of a lot to recommend it. We sure won't give students 200MB of disk space on any of our machines; I know at least one person who paid $50 out of his pocket, just to have some disk space for his music research. Finally, let me comment that, with a little surgery, it's easy to reclaim 100MB or so from most NeXT disks, if they're networked. Just nuke /NextLibrary, and mount one from another machine. The stuff in /NextLibrary is accessed only intermittently, and sharing it over the network is not a performance hit on network, client or server (unless of course the server is down, which is very bad news indeed). I've been doing this for some time now, and really enjoy having the extra space. -- Steve Dorner, U of Illinois Computing Services Office Internet: s-dorner@uiuc.edu UUCP: {convex,uunet}!uiucuxc!dorner IfUMust: (217) 244-1765