Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!lll-winken!lll-tis!ames!eos!aurora!labrea!Lindy!iris
From: iris@Lindy.STANFORD.EDU (IRIS)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: RAM disk info requested
Message-ID: <475@Lindy.STANFORD.EDU>
Date: 2 Mar 88 23:16:12 GMT
Reply-To: iris@Lindy.ARPA (AIR-IRIS)
Organization: Stanford Data Center
Lines: 30
Keywords: RAM disk


I help support several Macintosh clusters here at Stanford.  Some of
the clusters use MacServe or AppleShare.  Currently, we use RamStart
1.23 to create RAM disks on the Macs that contain all the important
system files, leaving the internal drives free for students' data
disks.  It works fairly well.  

However, RamStart 1.23 seems to be a bit flakey.  For some reason, it
doesn't always boot up with the disk size we originally specified.
There also doesn't appear to be any patter to its madness -- sometimes
it will work fine, and other times the RAM disk will shrink or grow.
After it's changed, it seems to want to stay changed at its new size.
"Ah," you say, "your students are changing the partition size."  Well,
we've drilled out the write protect tabs on some of the disks, and
physically removed them from others, and the problem persists.  Very
strange.

Does anyone have an explanation for this behaviour?  

Can anyone recommend a good RAM disk application?  It should do the
same things that RamStart 1.23 can do: configure a RAM disk with
whatever files we want, and then auto-eject.  I'd like info on *any*
worthwhile utility, not just PD and shareware programs (though a PD
package would be best).

Thanks...  reply to davef@jessica.stanford.edu if possible.

David Finkelstein
Academic Information Resources
Stanford University
davef@jessica.stanford.edu