[TUHS] RFS was: Re: UNIX of choice these days?

[Larry McVoy]

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

(*) 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.