Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!csd4.csd.uwm.edu!bbn!oliveb!amiga!boing!dale
From: dale@boing.UUCP (Dale Luck)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: X11, Ethernet, Shared Hard Disks
Message-ID: <848@boing.UUCP>
Date: 1 Sep 89 15:57:19 GMT
References: <22987@louie.udel.EDU>
Reply-To: dale@boing.UUCP (Dale Luck)
Organization: Boing, Milpitas, Ca.
Lines: 33

In article <22987@louie.udel.EDU> LIZAK98%SNYBUFVA.BITNET@cornellc.cit.cornell.edu writes:
>   Currently I am working on a new and exciting educational CAI system.  The
>system has training hardward along with CAI software w/ databasing on an
>Amiga 2000 system.
>
>   Our goal (and actually need) is to outfit each customer with 2-6 Amigas
>as workstations and 1 Amiga that would have a 200Mb harddisk.  Is it possible
>to have 1 hard disk shared over multiple computers.  If so, how is it done.
>If not, is X11 or Ethernet the way to go and what would have to be done in a
>nutshell to get that configuration to work?

Presently there is no capability to share a amiga harddisk with any other machine.
There is work in progress to make this happen but I don't think anyone has any
real time schedules they can commit to yet.

The current NFS implementation from Ameristar on the Amiga is client side only
and requires the shared disk to be on an NFS-server such as a Sun or some other
unix with NFS server capability. We really need an NFS server!
So you could place the shared database on a non-Amiga server for the time
being and move it to an Amiga with NFS-server in the future when one is
available.

Another option is to have all your code run on the shared A2000 (Better make it
a beefed up A2500) and have it bring up pictures and create graphics on remote
A2000's via ethernet/X11. This is not the optimal solution at present for one reason
GfxBase's current shipping X11 is only monochrome. Color is currently in alpha
testing. For another reason, the xlib/toolkits for the Amiga X11 are also only
in alpha testing.


-- 
Dale Luck     GfxBase/Boing, Inc.
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