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Re: [TCLUG:3894] re: semi-related rant



On Thu, 4 Feb 1999, Michael Hicks wrote:
> <semi-related rant>
> I get really annoyed by the University's IT Labs setup sometimes..  They
> have almost everything served off centralized servers -- including
> Netscape, Emacs, XEmacs, Mathematica, and other large programs..  They
> should really look into an alternative to that.  

It would help if you would e-mail your concerns to the people who maintain
the systems you're talking about.  That would be operator@itlabs.umn.edu.

> On any given day, my
> telnet session is jerky and slow.. 
> They should at least keep the most commonly used apps on local machines
> (use a cron job or something to keep them updated to the newest
> version..)  Hopefully it would clear up their bandwidth a bit...
> </semi-related rant>

The alternative would be to install software in an rdist tree and push out
updates when the labs are closed.  What's preventing us from doing that
right now?  Client disk space, and network bandwidth.

The networks are slowly being upgraded to 100Mbit equipment, but
most of the building is running on 10Base-2.  It's going to be quite awhile
before that changes.  4-204 is all 100Mbit, but we have to go over 10Base-2
to get to our machine room.  Hopefully this will be the next thing to be
upgraded.

It would be really nice if we had an NFS server for each subnet, and
maintained mirrors of the software trees on each.  Oh, I'm dreaming again. 

As far as Linux goes, one thing I've been working on is changing CSci over
to RedHat.  We've got about 20 RedHat systems so far, and once things are
tested thoroughly we'll be switching to RedHat in ITLabs.  Currently we're
running Slackware35 everywhere else, mostly because the home-brew jumpstart
system we're using makes it incredibly easy to install the clients.  But
now that kickstart is working better, I've been using that.

The nice thing about the new PCs we've been getting in is that they have
huge hard disks, so we *CAN* install a lot of the software
locally...netscape, xemacs, TeX...well, everything that comes with RedHat.

--Mark

==========================================================================
Mark A Bentley                  Email:  bentlema@cs.umn.edu
Systems Staff, CSci Dept
University of Minnesota         URL:    http://www.cs.umn.edu/~bentlema/