Xref: utzoo comp.protocols.nfs:1863 comp.arch:21179 Path: utzoo!utgpu!watserv1!watmath!att!linac!uwm.edu!spool.mu.edu!uunet!mcsun!ukc!dcl-cs!aber-cs!athene!pcg From: pcg@cs.aber.ac.uk (Piercarlo Grandi) Newsgroups: comp.protocols.nfs,comp.arch Subject: Re: Network file service bogosities Message-ID: Date: 1 Mar 91 22:42:45 GMT References: <28975@cs.yale.edu> <1991Feb22.012532.26075@murdoch.acc.Virginia.EDU> <4218@skye.ed.ac.uk> <1991Mar1.145431.3816@bellcore.bellcore.com> Sender: aro@aber-cs.UUCP Organization: Coleg Prifysgol Cymru Lines: 33 Nntp-Posting-Host: teachb In-reply-to: mo@messy.bellcore.com's message of 1 Mar 91 14:54:31 GMT Posting-Front-End: GNU Emacs 18.55.4 of Thu Nov 23 1989 on athene (berkeley-unix) On 1 Mar 91 14:54:31 GMT, mo@messy.bellcore.com (Michael O'Dell) said: mo> Don't move data if you don't need to. mo> or mo> Don't move data over a thin wire if you can move it over a thick one. mo> Seems pretty obvious to me. Cannot argue with your comment, I am afraid. I am sorry for restating the obvious in so many words, but I have spent so much time explaining it to various people in the past, and observing that a large number of LANs are configured as if the obvious were deep misteries of the lost Atlantis, that I wanted to put things on record. Also, it does not seem so obvious to all those that buy into things like NFS accelerators instead of more memory for clients or NFS engines with several Ethernet interfaces and Ethernet wires (Auspex, for example, to make Guy Harris happy), things that make some sense. Also, I want to initiate a move back to timesharing machines, my first love (ahhh, a nice 1108 with DEMAND and a FASTRAND; ahhhh, a nice 370/168 with CP/CMS and 2435s; ahhh, a nice 6080 with Multics and IOPs; ahhh, a nice 11/70 with 2.9BSD and 2 80MB removables; ...). Most syadmins are hapless, and as of now they are the greatest performance bottleneck, not even the wire. LANs are much more difficult to administer than timesharing, and much more difficult to tune. I tried to give some qualitative idea of the enormity of the problems... -- Piercarlo Grandi | ARPA: pcg%uk.ac.aber.cs@nsfnet-relay.ac.uk Dept of CS, UCW Aberystwyth | UUCP: ...!mcsun!ukc!aber-cs!pcg Penglais, Aberystwyth SY23 3BZ, UK | INET: pcg@cs.aber.ac.uk