On Wed, Oct 19, 2011 at 9:11 AM, Tilghman Lesher <[email protected]>wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 18, 2011 at 4:13 PM, Steven S. Critchfield wrote: > > Net booting is nothing special if your netcard supports it. > > > > Trouble with a local cache would be how would you know > > when the central image changed? Essentially, if you cached > > a local copy and are not the only one accessing the > > filesystem, you do not know when the remote file changed. > > Sure it is. You just need to check the mtime of the file on the > server, verifying it against the cached mtime of the file when it > was last retrieved (or last saved to the server). > > > Normal cache and swap would handle most of the > > problems you would have. Most used apps would be cached > > the same as if it had been a local filesystem. Given time and > > memory starvation, it will cycle out until needed again. > > That covers it for a normal boot cycle, but upon reboot, swap > would be wiped, and you'd have to start over again. I see a > certain beauty in the design of that Sun system. Given how > cheap disks are nowadays, and the danger of a central point of > failure, however, I don't see a particularly great reason to > reimplement it. > > -Tilghman > > This is reaching back a while. The Sun JAVA workstations were that way. On the old systems I worked with, the cache was not held in swap. It was on it's own file system on a small disk so it was persistent over boots. If you did an OS update on the server the next re-boot did suck pretty badly (very slow till the OS and related libraries were cached). It was not a basic x-terminal or a ram-only system that I used, it was older IPX or IPC systems (small shoebox systems). I think it basically used jumpstart to initially set up the boxen (a network boot and configuration system that can be used for much more), but the os it booted was a microkernel that set up the system and then ran a standard SUN OS on it. Still, it was a neat hack to help get more life and lower admin costs out of older systems. These were not used for 'high production value' servers or clients, but for folks that did web surfing, web development (static pages for the most part back then), office type tasks, not hard core graphic or cpu intensive tasks. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "NLUG" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/nlug-talk?hl=en
