Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP
Posting-Version: version B 2.10.2 9/5/84; site utrc-2at.UUCP
Path: utzoo!utcs!mnetor!yetti!utrc-2at!drews
From: drews@utrc-2at.UUCP (Drew Sullivan)
Newsgroups: net.news
Subject: Re: The politics of groups (of people)
Message-ID: <131@utrc-2at.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 12-Sep-85 11:45:36 EDT
Article-I.D.: utrc-2at.131
Posted: Thu Sep 12 11:45:36 1985
Date-Received: Thu, 12-Sep-85 14:31:04 EDT
References: <1996@amdahl.UUCP>, <791@vortex.UUCP> <626@bu-cs.UUCP> <1090@ulysses.UUCP>
Organization: Ultrasecure Tempest Research Corp., Toronto, Ont. CAN.
Lines: 19

> I'm afraid you're grossly underestimating the CPU and disk throughput
> requirements to put netnews on a machine.  2 of our 5 outbound links, on
> a 750 used solely as a communications server (Ethernets, DMR-11s, laser
> printers, etc.), are at high speed.  Guess what -- one uuxqt running rnews
> and there are no cycles left.  If there are two, reading news will become
> unpleasant.  Those two plus a print job will totally kill the machine.

Here at UTRC we are running two dedicated IBM-ATs.  One is planned to be a
printer server with various laser printers  hung off of it, and the other is
the news machine.  With about 40 megs of disk and 2 megs of memory, I have
found no problem with both vnews and rnews running at the same time.
What is planned is to have lots of cut-down PCs connected via a network
as user machines that take/put files to the AT servers, in this way we
always have cycles to spare.  The cost of the user-interface (and hence
reponse time) is born by the PCs and the back-bone machines are tuned
for other requirements.  Our biggest problem now is setting up the
network.

 -- Drew.