Mike Gerdts wrote: > On 9/8/07, Richard Elling <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> Changing the topic slightly, the strategic question is: >> why are you providing disk space to students? > > For most programming and productivity (e.g. word processing, etc.) > people will likely be better suited by having network access for their > personal equipment with local storage.
Local storage would be a nightmare for secure back-ups. Having said that, for those using Windows PC and MacOS X we do let them have control of their machine and store things locally, but it's their own risk. The central service merely provides a (smallish) home directory which we guarantee to back-up. Quotas are needed in this case because users can't be trusted to play fair, especially if they don't realise how bit the files that they are dragging and dropping are. These machines are also firewalled to hell and back. For the rest of the researchers, who have Linux or Solaris machines, we do not allow them administrative access. All software and home directories are NFS mounted from the central server so that any machine a user logs into will give them the same set of tools so that they can do their work anywhere they need to. Thier home directories need to be policed by the system because users can't be fully trusted to play fair and secondly some software will try to cache lots of data in their home directories without the user knowing. Now, in our current set-up all these users have a soft limit and a hard quota. Every night a cron job parses the output of repquota -a and informs those people who have gone overtheir soft quota and hard quota. The difference in size between the soft and hard quotas is enough that, in general, it doesn't affect the user's work and allows them to remediate the problem before it becomes critical (and important files suddenly get emptied or the user can't log in). For large datasets the research groups have their own servers from which data etc. is available. As said previously, the central allocation of space is merely enough for day-to-day documents/theses/papers etc. Oh, and our HPC grid is fully intergrated into this set-up as well. The idea being a consistant experience throughout the research network. Steve -- --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Computer Systems Administrator, E-Mail:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Department of Earth Sciences, Tel:- +44 (0)1865 282110 University of Oxford, Parks Road, Oxford, UK. Fax:- +44 (0)1865 272072 _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
