Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!crdgw1!crdos1!davidsen
From: davidsen@crdos1.crd.ge.COM (Wm E Davidsen Jr)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: Single user vs. shared (was Re: Killer Micros and vectorized code)
Message-ID: <2170@crdos1.crd.ge.COM>
Date: 22 Mar 90 13:51:27 GMT
References: <51771@lll-winken.LLNL.GOV> <100598@convex.convex.com> <1990Mar20.174931.2202@utzoo.uucp> <1771@aurora.AthabascaU.CA>
Reply-To: davidsen@crdos1.crd.ge.com (bill davidsen)
Organization: GE Corp R&D Center, Schenectady NY
Lines: 29

In article <1771@aurora.AthabascaU.CA> rwa@cs.AthabascaU.CA (Ross Alexander) writes:

| Yes, yes, and yes.  Amateurs, even extremely well-meaning and erudite
| ones, are paid not to adminstrate their workstations but to *get their
| primary jobs done* be that what may.  Backups are not their primary
| job, and in the nature of things get pushed down the queue until they
| fall off the bottom.  Then cometh the day of reckoning, and Lo!  there
| is no backup, folks.  

  This is true of PCs but not of workstations. The workstation may very
well have most of its filesystems NFS mounted on a large machine anyway,
keeping only the system files and temp local, and in any case can be
backed up by a script run from cron on a regular basis.

  We do that for 400 workstations here, and it just works. Daily
incrementals, weekly full dumps (staggered to spread load), one operator
mounting tapes on the drives. If a sysmgr sets up a good crontab once,
the system will take care of itself for the most part, and detect most
problems and send mail to the professional manager. This leaves the user
to make the choice of when (if) the o/s gets upgraded, etc. Other stuff
like updating the alias and sendmail files gets done by cron, too.

  By giving the user a modest system of his/her own, things like
mail/news/editing run at constant and predictable speed, while file,
compute, print, and {n,t,e}roff servers provide cheap shared power to
keep the cost of computing down.
-- 
bill davidsen	(davidsen@crdos1.crd.GE.COM -or- uunet!crdgw1!crdos1!davidsen)
            "Stupidity, like virtue, is its own reward" -me