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

["Shawn T . Amundson" <amundson@gimp.org>]

A Solaris-like cachefs would fix these problems without requiring big 
rdist hacks.  I don't think it exists for Linux, but you might want to 
investigate.

-Shawn

On Sun, Feb 07, 1999 at 09:50:37AM -0600, Mark A. Bentley wrote:
> 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/
> 
> 
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--
Shawn T. Amundson               
amundson@gimp.org               http://www.gimp.org/~amundson

"The assumption that the universe looks the same in every
 direction is clearly not true in reality." - Stephen Hawking