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From: lemson@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu (David Lemson)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.next
Subject: Re: Toward a "Public NeXT Lab" guidebook
Message-ID: <1991Jun15.030839.13953@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu>
Date: 15 Jun 91 03:08:39 GMT
References: <9106141908.AA25449@cheops.cis.ohio-state.edu>
Organization: University of Illinois at Urbana
Lines: 48

First of all, I manage a lab of 22 NeXT workstations including 3
Color slabs, 3 030 Cubes and the rest 105MB Stations.  I really
appreciate your notes and have a bit to add.

CCGREG@umcvmb.missouri.edu (Greg Johnson) writes:

>However, my impression
>is that though one can free a few meg by removing /NextApps, /NextLibrary,
>/NextDeveloper, and odds and ends of specific files in /usr, frankly,
>there's not much fat on a 105MB slab that NeXT has not already sacrificed.
Watch out that you have gobs of slab hard drive space available on
NeXTStation Color machines.  When a user opens up 20 1024x768x256
color GIF's at the same time, the /private/vm/swap file grows to
around 50 MB.  You can set in the /etc/swaptab guidelines for
swapfile size, but the real way to get around the problem is to have
more space available.  

In our lab, we have the luxury of not much serious work going on.
Calculus courses taught on Mathematica (and we have a lot of them
here) are taught exclusively on Mac II's in a different lab.
Basically, our lab is for playing around with the NeXT.  We also
give free student UNIX accounts on another production machine, so we
state in our user applications that users should not use the NeXT's
for mail.  Our mail has definitely been screwy.  Mail mailed to a
user at one of the station sometimes gets returned to sender,
sometimes gets properly routed to the one NeXT designated
(explicitly, in the sendmail.cf file) as mailhost.  

People setting up NeXT labs for student use should be prepared to
stock all kinds of books about the DSP chips, for example.  Our NeXT
tech liasion has a set of these books, but we do not.  I have had
several requests for these references from Engineering students who
want to use the DSP chip for various research.  People say, "What
are those NeXT's good for?"  Some people answer "DSP."

A large problem we have had is the server /Users drive getting full
due to .snd and .gif/.tiff files.  Sound files are huge, and people
are bound to ftp them.  (We have an external network connection,
obviously).  To tell the truth, I think that you might be happier
without an external Internet connection if you've gotten along without
it so far.  Of course, it is nice to be able to do most all sys
admin from home via dialup, of course.



-- 
David Lemson   University of Illinois Computing Services Consultant
Internet : lemson@uiuc.edu         UUCP :...!uiucuxc!uiucux1!lemson