Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ucbvax!ucsd!orion.cf.uci.edu!uci-ics!venera.isi.edu!raveling From: raveling@vaxb.isi.edu (Paul Raveling) Newsgroups: comp.windows.x Subject: Re: A Thought on X Terminals Message-ID: <7610@venera.isi.edu> Date: 22 Feb 89 18:36:35 GMT References: <19613@agate.BERKELEY.EDU> <611@gt-eedsp.UUCP> <4921@xenna.Encore.COM> <13216@steinmetz.ge.com> Sender: news@venera.isi.edu Reply-To: raveling@isi.edu (Paul Raveling) Distribution: comp Organization: USC-Information Sciences Institute Lines: 37 In article <13216@steinmetz.ge.com> dawn!stpeters@steinmetz.UUCP () writes: >In article <4921@xenna.Encore.COM> bzs@Encore.COM (Barry Shein) writes: >>Yes, but you're falling into the standard "diskless workstation" >>fallacy, that the disk behind that diskless is not going to cost >>anything. In fact you usually need around 24MB of disk, at least, just >>to boot the thing (8MB root, 16MB swap), if you need to support even a >>dozen users you better throw in the price of a server also so suddenly >>you've easily eaten an additional $50K of hardware, or once again the >>price of the workstations. > >Barry, now you've fallen into a fallacy: pulling numbers from >yesterday's technology to argue a point about tomorrow's. My diskless >Sun has all of 2.9MB "in" it's root partition - "in" in quotes because >its root "partition" is an NFS-mounted directory on the server. For a different perspective, my workstation has about 3/4 gigabyte of local disk and mounts about the same from a file server, another workstation, and a VAX. >SunOS 4.0 does require that the server have a fixed-size swap file for >each client, but I'd bet that restriction doesn't last. Anyway, a >diskless client used just as a windowing terminal doesn't need 16MB >swap. Another aspect of our different perspective is that we need about 75 megabytes of swap space, with the biggest demand coming from running LISP under UNIX. The bottom line is there's a whole range of requirements for different users. The best solution for any given organization can easily be a mix of X terminals, diskless workstations, "diskful" workstations, and even mainframes. ---------------- Paul Raveling Raveling@isi.edu