Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!purdue!umd5!magorian
From: magorian@umd5.umd.edu (Dan Magorian)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: Re: What's the best NETWORK?
Message-ID: <2758@umd5.umd.edu>
Date: 19 May 88 20:44:32 GMT
References: <1814@uhccux.UUCP> <1815@uhccux.UUCP> <781@sleazy.UUCP> <2722@umd5.umd.edu> <591@drexel.UUCP> <2964@phoenix.Princeton.EDU>
Reply-To: magorian@umd5 (Dan Magorian)
Organization: University of Maryland, College Park
Lines: 36

>We've been looking at the problem of getting hard-diskless Macs on to
>servers and the logistics of providing the "boot up" they need to get
>on a server here at Princeton.  For the present, it seems that somehow
>we need to get a floppy disk into those machines.  Any ideas on how?
>   1) mass produce and distribute start-up disks?
>   2) strap/lock boot disks into the machines?
>   3) put them in vending machines on campus?
>   4) keep boxes of them available in the labs?
> 
The system we use for MacIIs in labs (2 meg mem, 2 floppies, ethertalk only,
Applefileshare server) is:  the boot floppy startup app is a ramdisk, which
chops out 700k and then runs Sequencer, which runds some initializing startup
apps then loads Hypercard off the server.  This allows the boot floppies to
be permanently write-protected with clippers.  This was necessary because
students stole them for personal use (but it's really ugly).  Then the ramdisk
is writeable, for people to add their favorite fonts, das, etc, and the Home
needs to be writeable as well.  On the next boot, the customized (often
trashed-out) stuff is gone).  It works really well, and runs faster as well
(except booting, which takes over a minute).  Local hard disks were considered
and rejected for public labs - we have them with IBM Model 50s, and the 
management needed turns into a real pain:  integrity checks on the local
applications, auto downloading from a server if trashed, space checking, etc.
Not the way to go if you have an option.  We have workstation coordinator 
people who replace floppies and toner carts (yes, people even steal the
"neutered" ones but far less often).  We didn't seriously consider vending
machines etc for floppies, but I would really like to go to a diskless system
with a boot process on the AFS (or better yet, an NFS) server.  By the way,
we have single copies of all software (with site licenses, etc) and stacks
in write-protected folders, and everything works well (using Hypercard's
debug writeoff kludge till we get 1.2).  Hypercard also works really well as a
menu-based application launcher as well as flexible Hypertalk environment for
power users (we looked at Powerstation, but it wasn't nearly flexible enough).

Dan Magorian
Comp Sci Ctr
Univ of Maryland