Xref: utzoo comp.sys.mac.hardware:1217 comp.protocols.appletalk:2908 Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uwm.edu!rpi!sci.ccny.cuny.edu!phri!news From: roy@alanine.phri.nyu.edu (Roy Smith) Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.hardware,comp.protocols.appletalk Subject: Info wanted on Jasmine DirectDrive Message-ID: <1990Jan17.201058.24959@phri.nyu.edu> Date: 17 Jan 90 20:10:58 GMT Sender: news@phri.nyu.edu (News System) Organization: Public Health Research Institute, New York City Lines: 32 A few months ago, I asked for peoples' opinions on the Jasmine DirectServe. A got a bunch of responses, mostly along the lines of "it looks good, but it's still vaporware, so I don't have any real data yet". One or two people reported generally good experiences with the JDS in an earlier incarnation from another company. Now that it's been shipping for a while, I'm repeating my query. If you've got a DirectServe, I'd like to hear about your experiences with it. From the specs, it looks like a great way to get an AppleShare server set up, assuming the product works as well as it's supposed to. I know all about Jasmine's recent business problems; I'd appreciate if people would try and factor out the technical issues from the general "dealing with Jasmine, Inc." problems. We'd probably get the server from Jasmine but the disk elsewhere. If you know of any good alternatives to the DirectServe, I'd be interested in hearing about them too. Buying an SE-30 to dedicate as a file server seems like an expensive way to go. Various people have suggested that CPU speed on the server is not really important, especially over localtalk speeds. More important are fast disks and a big ram cache (this is certainly true of ethernet NFS servers), and that we might get along fine with a Mac-Plus as a server; any opinions on that? We currently run the CAP printer stuff, but not aufs. Setting up papif and lwserv was not trivial and a few half-hearted attempts at getting aufs running have failed. Do people really run aufs in production environments? Even if it works, I'm not sure we would go with aufs anyway; one of our goals is to not have the macs depend on our Sun file servers for essential services. -- Roy Smith, Public Health Research Institute 455 First Avenue, New York, NY 10016 roy@alanine.phri.nyu.edu -OR- {att,philabs,cmcl2,rutgers,hombre}!phri!roy "My karma ran over my dogma"