Re: [TUHS] RFS was: Re: UNIX of choice these days?

The issue we (initially) had with Suns wasn't the stateful/stateless debate, or indeed that they were discless. It was that horrible "UNIX authentication" that NFS used. We had been using discless "workstations" and fileservers since around the late '70s / early '80s, basically ever since we discovered that virtual DECtapes were a whole lot faster than the real thing. Our "filestores" didn't trust their clients -- they did the authentication themselves -- so we could let the students loose doing bare-metal practicals without having to worry about them breaking in. That model didn't work for us with NFS. However, Sun were keen to sell us kit (and DEC didn't seem to be), and they could sell us things for less than we could build them ourselves, so we eventually ended up with a couple of hundred or so of the things. And they swapped like mad and thrashed the network into the ground. We split subnets, and split subnets (and had some interesting amd maps as a result of trying to keep traffic local) and eventually ended up with so many that we couldn't run them all through all the offices as the cable bundle was too big, which was a nightmare for the admin staff trying to allocate people to desks. Twisted pair, and then switches, saved us from that problem! (We also had an X-terminal lab for a while, with a couple of beefy Suns as CPU servers. That had its own, different, contention issues. We learned from that not to arrange things in neat blocks, as the students would come in after lectures and go for the first free machine nearest the door, so using the naive approach we could end up with one CPU server being totally overloaded and the other practically idle.) Now everything is a PC with a ginormous disc, and the contention has moved to CPU cores and GPUs. The more you throw at it the more the academics will come up with some way to saturate the thing... (<http://history.dcs.ed.ac.uk/archive/os/APM-filestore/FS.1976/> for my rewrite of the original Interdata filestore code, btw, and <http://history.dcs.ed.ac.uk/archive/docs/dcs-inf-network-history.pdf> for a bit more on our network history. There was also a filestore version that ran on VMS and served files from that out to the network, but I haven't been able to get a copy of that back off tape yet.) -- George D M Ross MSc PhD CEng MBCS CITP University of Edinburgh, School of Informatics, Appleton Tower, 11 Crichton Street, Edinburgh, Scotland, EH8 9LE Mail: gdmr(a)inf.ed.ac.uk Voice: 0131 650 5147 PGP: 1024D/AD758CC5 B91E D430 1E0D 5883 EF6A 426C B676 5C2B AD75 8CC5 The University of Edinburgh is a charitable body, registered in Scotland, with registration number SC005336.