On Thu, 6 Oct 1994, Michael Fagan wrote:
> Hi,
>
> We started running AFS over SL/IP for our home machines. The
> performance is tolerable for a 14400 line and will only improve as the
> speed of the line increases.
>
I started to do the same thing a few months ago and am overall pleased with
the results, once realizing that the cache starts being a very valuable
repository. Overall data transfer is around 1.5 kB/s, using modem
compression. CSLIP or not does not make a difference for me. I reduced the
chunk size a bit since that seemed to be the only way to give any power to
ctrl-C in order to get some control back after mistakenly typing 'mosaic'
(roughly 6 MB big, the people here are not very good at linking efficiently).
> The one observation I have made so far is that many things seem to
> travel over the (slow) link twice. For example, I read my mail from a
> POP server using (emacs) mh. When I type "inc" the mail travels from
> the POP server to my home machine. Then the mail is written to my
> home directory, which is in AFS, causing the *same* piece of data to
> travel back across the slow link to some AFS file server.
That's more clever than what I did: my mailbox resided in AFS, and 'pine'
obviously transferred the whole lot in order to check for 'From' lines, only
to discover (after roughly 10 minutes) that some new mail had arrived and the
mailbox had to be re-read. I switched to pine with IMAP access which works
*much* better. Still, things go over the line a couple of times when I save a
mail.
Things I found out to be not very practical the hard way:
- mosaic: every other link points to a bitmap,
- SoftWindows with -display from another machine: it took roughly 15
minutes to display the 'Microsoft Windows' logo,
- SoftWindows locally is OK; well, it took me over an hour to get it going
and fire up solitaire in windows the first time; but now the load time is
acceptable, the major drawback is that my Sun IPC simply lacks the horsepower
to make the PC emulation move the solitaire cards smoothly,
- grep with '*'s in the file list (obvious, but it happens),
- when compiling (make) a bigger program, an 'lndir' from a local
directory speeded things up significantly.
things that are annoying:
- login takes more than 2 minutes the first time. I log in through xdm, and
traced it down to files in the directory '.Xauthority' being created and
erased several times; there must be a way to turn that off, just didn't have
the patience yet,
- my /usr/local/bin contains several hundred links into /afs; since
it's in my path, the first mistyped command after a boot causes a major
lockout.
Also, at such slow speeds it would be nice to have a little window which
shows which file/chunk is in the process of being transferred. The modem
lights tell me in which direction, but it would be reassuring anyway. I
doubt that the AFS log file could be a pipe...
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Rainer Toebbicke - [EMAIL PROTECTED] -or- [EMAIL PROTECTED] O__
European Laboratory for Particle Physics(CERN) - Geneva, Switzerland > |
Phone: +41 22 767 4911 Fax: +41 22 767 8690 ( )\( )
