on Wed, Apr 18, 2001 at 04:13:03PM -0500, will trillich ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: > On Tue, Apr 17, 2001 at 11:20:45PM -0700, Karsten M. Self wrote:
<...> [Points] > > - Disk is cheap. Bandwidth still sucks. System and distro > > maintenance are both time-consuming and expensive. The ideal > > "diskless" client isn't truely diskless, but transparently caches a > > configuration driven by a configuration served over the network. > > System data are backed off to network, user data are similarly > > cached locally only until they can be archived to network. > > > > A dream to date, but a pleasant one. > > i'm thinking of making this a VPN or NAT box only, no user > interaction whatever. surely we don't need lots-o-fancy packages > & such just to forward net packets... What do you mean by "no user interaction"? No user system configuration? To be useful, a computer is almost by definition, user-interactive. Or do you mean "VNC" rather than "VPN"? I gather that these are user-based systems. I'd aim toward something that's faster-responding (people hate latency). For a compute farm, latency matters far less than throughput, and the fully diskless model works much better. You can set up a network of X-Terminals and one (or more) high-powered servers that they run off of. Usually this is a more efficient use of CPU and other resources. Computer utilization patterns tend, in general, to be *very* bursty. I'm reading through some AT&T research stuff on network utilization -- most public long-distance networks are only about 10-30% utilized (average), most LANs are about 1% utilized (average). Anything much over 50-70% is considered pretty saturated. Even in large aggregate, traffic patterns are bursty. Similar usage patterns exist for CPU and disk. The problem though is latency -- applications load more slowly, graphics display more slowly. Even at 100 mbps fast Ethernet speeds, you'll note the lag. > > You'll almost certainly need *some* local storage, even if proxied > > through a RAMdisk. Note that /var content will tend to need to be > > stored. > > i wonder about the system on the debian potato install cd... does > it have or need a /var directory? if not, what's it take to > replicate that kind of setup? what packages need nixing? The installation disk is almost certainly not a good model -- it has very little use for /var, most of which is concerned with temporal content that changes with system configuration changes and services (new, mail, website, logs). It installs largely as a RAMdisk with, IIRC, three or four partitions of 4MB each, including a 4MB /tmp partition. The LinuxCare BBC operates similarly, with some RAM and some live-from-CD partitions. Another example of a live CD install is the SuSE distribution. I'd played with this in the past, a friend of mine was reporting on it recently. You can run pretty much a full GNU/Linux installation just by sliding the CDROM into the drive. Not quick. Noisy. But there, and no permanent on-disk modifications required. > > > pointers hither and yon are requested. > > > > ====--> Hither > > Yon <--==== > > oh good. that clears up a lot. several people were telling me > that hither was east (at least when i read my email on the > monitor behind me)... Actually, linguistic point of the day, "hither and yon" is pretty much equivalent to saying "here and there". "Hither" means "here", "yon" means "away from" (but usually within sight). "Come hither". "Yon house". -- Karsten M. Self <kmself@ix.netcom.com> http://kmself.home.netcom.com/ What part of "Gestalt" don't you understand? There is no K5 cabal http://gestalt-system.sourceforge.net/ http://www.kuro5hin.org
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