29 Sep
2017
29 Sep
'17
12:20 a.m.
On Fri, Sep 29, 2017 at 08:08:16AM +1000, Dave Horsfall wrote:
On Thu, 28 Sep 2017, Clem Cole wrote:
I dunno why all the hating on diskless. They actually work, I used the
heck out of them. For kernel work, stacking one on top of the other,
the test machine being diskless, was a cheap way to get a setup.
Sure, disk was better and if your work load was write heavy then they
sucked (*), but for testing, for editing, that sort of thing, they were
fine.
--lm
(*) I did a distributed make when I was working on clusters. Did the
compiles on a pile of clients, all the data was on the NFS server, I started
the build on the NFS server, did all the compiles remotely, did the link
locally. Got a 12x speed up on a 16 node + server setup. The other kernel
hacks were super jealous. They were all sharing a big SMP machine with
a Solaris that didn't scale for shit, I was way faster.
Truth is that an Sun-3 running
'diskless' != as an Apollo running
'twinned.' [There is a famous Clem' story I'll not repeat here from
Masscomp about a typo I made, but your imagination would probably be right
- when I refused to do build a diskless system for Masscomp]....
Not the infamous "dikless" workstation? I remember a riposte from a woman
(on Usenet?), saying she didn't know that it was an option...