From: pauld@cs.washington.edu (Paul Barton-Davis) Subject: Re: X terminals: Suggestion for projects like SLS, MCC, etc. Date: Mon, 14 Jun 1993 22:24:00 GMT
In article <hastyC8Mq5C.Mu3@netcom.com> hasty@netcom.com (Amancio Hasty Jr) writes:
>In article <1993Jun14.194758.18781@beaver.cs.washington.edu> pauld@cs.washington.edu (Paul Barton-Davis) writes:
>>In article <1993Jun14.145054.20767@wixer.bga.com> rhodesia@wixer.bga.com (Felix S. Gallo) writes:
>>>mark@taylor.uucp (Mark A. Davis) writes:
>
>>You've clearly never managed an X terminal. I do. 68 of 'em. They are
>>at least two orders of magnitude easier than managing a Unix host.
>
>What makes you think that if an X-terminal company can write
>a simple configuration program that we can't do the same for
>a diskless workstation?
Mr. Gallo wasn't restricting his remarks to diskless workstations, but
was describing PC's that run some OS like DOS, Unix or Linux.
I notice that despite the demand, no-one has yet written such a
"simple configuration program" as you describe. Lets just deal with a
few "trivial" issues: does the diskless workstation support printing ?
If so how is printing configured ? Password file management ? Network
interfaces ? Swap space ? User environment ?
I'm not saying it can't be done, but there are only 24 hours in a day,
and X terminals are already working.
X terminals win by massively restricting what can be done via direct
interaction with them. I've heard rumors that a magic escape sequence
on the Tektronix will get you a shell prompt (not hard, since they run
QNX), but even adding that mediocre level of user support (which is
hardly half-way to a full diskless workstation) would entail an
incredible increase in the complexity of configuration.
>>On our instructional netwrok, we have (had) 2 hosts supporting 32 X
>>terminals along with another dozen or so ascii terminals. That makes
>>about 44 of the *most* demanding users: CS undergrads. Ever seen what
>>a decent session of nettrek does to your system ? Let alone our own
>>client/server multi-player dogfight, an application that makes large
>>database queries look like "grep" in comparison (network load wise,
>>anyway).
>
>I am curious as to the performance of such a network and the host
>computer?
It works just fine. We had to restrict the hours for game playing, but
that was mostly due to the noises the players tend to make. Stuff bogs
down when an Ada (gack!) assignment is due the following day, but for
the most part, its a quite workable environment, certainly up to the
commercial environments I've worked in. The network is not much of a
bottleneck, other than via peak loading. We do have an experimental
FDDI cable that currently carries NFS traffic, but this is recent, and
the system was fine before hand.
-- paul
-- Nonviolence is not a land of milk and honey. Nonviolence is tough. You don't practice nonviolence by attending conferences, you practice it on picket lines, and that can he hard when you are faced with people who may be ready to attack you with rocks, baseball bats, knives, even guns. [ Cesar Chavez ]