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From: jaf@Inference.COM (Jose Fernandez)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.apollo
Subject: The Hardy Few
Message-ID: <9104172353.AA26033@quaestor.Inference.COM>
Date: 17 Apr 91 23:53:18 GMT
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Your posting seems to me to be unfairly critical of certain things that I
think may have been done a different way.

    Originally we were going to have a network of 500 workstations and
    everyone had to have the ability to talk to everyone else.  Well we tested
    a small network of Suns and a small network of Apollos.  Based on the
    amount of time needed to across mount all of the Sun systems, it would
    take 500 workstations 1 1/2 months to get everyone talking to everyone
    else if we took a power hit.  The Apollos on the other hand would take
    about 10 mins.

Automounting will significantly reduce the cross-mount time.  Unfortunately, I
have no objective measurement of how well either an APOLLO or SUN node would
perform when a very large number of other nodes attempts to look into one of
its filesystems.

    Additionally the management aspect of NS is much easier than NFS.  With
    NFS you have to update each workstation's tables from that workstation.
    With NS you update using ctnode (from any workstation) and all of the
    other nodes will be able to find the node (if the address is not hashed
    already).  We have a cron job on every node that refreshes the hash table
    twice aday.  This is still better than going to every workstation and
    removing a mount point.

Huh?  Shouldn't you be using NIS (Network Information Service, formerly known
as the Yellow Pages)?

    As a side note we at one point had 900+ workstations and 8 sys_admins
    (112+:1).  Over the last year we have scaled back to 583 workstations and
    6 sys_admins (97:1). Lets see Sun sys_admins support that many
    workstations.

Well, if that's a challenge...  Put up a bond for the salary price of 8 SA's,
plus SUN SW & HW maintenance...  Just kidding.  Maybe not.  That's a hell of a
lot of money and would certainly be incentive...