Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!wuarchive!rice!rice!sun-spots-request
From: katz@rpal.com
Newsgroups: comp.sys.sun
Subject: Re: Diskless, Dataless, and in-between...
Keywords: SunOS
Message-ID: <1990Oct31.235644.22491@rice.edu>
Date: 1 Nov 90 00:20:28 GMT
Sender: sun-spots-request@rice.edu
Organization: Sun-Spots
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Approved: Sun-Spots@rice.edu
Originator: spots@titan.rice.edu
X-Sun-Spots-Digest: Volume 9, Issue 352, message 5
X-Original-Date: 10 Oct 90 10:54:26
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In article <1990Oct7.223836.28419@rice.edu> jac@sundance.llnl.gov (James Crotinger) writes:

> I recently acquired a disk for my formerly diskless SS1 and I am trying to
> decide how to reconfigure my system. Our first inclination was to move
> swap and /tmp to the local disk, leaving the root file system on the
> server so that it would be backed up regularly. However the Sun
> documentation doesn't mention using such a configuration and I'm wondering
> if there is a reason. Are there advantages to having the root file system
> local? In particular I can imagine that there might be performance
> advantages. Are there?

Actually, at one point some people found that access files on a fileserver
can be faster than accessing local disk.  This is because fileservers
often have faster, more efficient disks that offset the network delay.
Sun does not support having only swap on a local disk, but this is the way
all of our machines run.  We believe that this is a nice compromise
between efficiency and system administration effort.  I want all of our
file to be on aa fileserver which is backed up nightly, etc.  However, I
do not want to load our net with lots of paging traffic.  We achieve the
above by building a custom kermel with the following config line (OS4.1):

config	vmunix	root on type nfs swap on type spec sd0c

Morry Katz
Rockwell Science Center
administrator@rpal.com (machine administration issues)
katz@rpal.com (other)