From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: andreas.kahari@icm.uu.se (Andreas Kusalananda =?iso-8859-1?B?S+Ro5HJp?=) Date: Fri, 29 Sep 2017 10:59:23 +0200 Subject: [TUHS] RFS was: Re: UNIX of choice these days? In-Reply-To: <20170928222056.GD28606@mcvoy.com> References: <201709270844.v8R8i2kd021180@freefriends.org> <201709281349.v8SDnHp2005910@freefriends.org> <20170928222056.GD28606@mcvoy.com> Message-ID: <20170929085923.nclqn5g4xang4vii@client.local> On Thu, Sep 28, 2017 at 03:20:56PM -0700, Larry McVoy wrote: > On Fri, Sep 29, 2017 at 08:08:16AM +1000, Dave Horsfall wrote: > > On Thu, 28 Sep 2017, Clem Cole wrote: > > > > >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... > > 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 My main work setup today is actually a diskless (X11-less) OpenBSD system. It's just something I set up in a VM environment to learn how to do it (I'm on a work laptop running Windows 10, as I need Windows for some few work-related tasks), but it works just fine and I have no reason to change it. For one thing, it makes backups easier as they can run locally on the server. At some point I hope to buy I smaller dedicated server to run the NFS server (and mail, etc.) but I see no real reason not to keep running the diskless client in a VM on my laptop. Heck, then I might even be able to netboot the laptop itself without disturbing the Windows system on it at all... > > (*) 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. > OpenBSD has this "dpb" thing ("distributed ports builder", /usr/ports/infrastructure/bin/dpb, http://man.openbsd.org/dpb) that does distributed building of 3rd-party packages. It does exactly this, sharing the sources over NFS. Cheers, -- Andreas Kusalananda Kähäri, National Bioinformatics Infrastructure Sweden (NBIS), Uppsala University, Sweden.