[K12OSN] IDE if /home is NFS?

[Dan Young]

Sudev Barar said:
> On Wed, 2004-03-31 at 21:50, pnelson wrote:
>> Yup... We have 4 application servers, dual Xeons, running K12LTSP
>> 4.0.1
>> with IDE drives. Each server NFS mounts /home. Once Mozilla and
>> OpenOffice is up and running, there's not much left for the drives to
>> do. These machines are used by about 115 clients.
>
> Sorry for my limited knowledge but a question here:
> If /home is NFS mounted the advantage (and speed) of having files and
> processing capabilities on the same server (read same bus) goes away and
> network traffic increases? So if users starts OO and the file is mounted
> from NFS then the additional time for file transfer will slow down
> things a bit....Please what is the PCI bus speed in comparison to NFS
> (100mbps or maybe newer 1000mbps)? Yes I can appreciate advantages of
> central file server but what is speed trade off?

Via gigabit, it's plenty fast enough, from my experience. Using your
example, OOo is slow enough to load, I don't think pulling a 200k .sxw
adds significantly.

With a single channel, Ultra160 SCSI's theoretical throughput is
160MBps*8bits (1280 Mbps). Not all that much greater than Gb ethernet at
125MBps = 1000Mbps / 8bits.

One thing I have thought about w/ NFS mounted homes is the temp files
some apps put hidden ~/.foo directories. The GIMP can be reconfigured to
swap to /tmp rather than ~/.gimp-1.2, but Mozilla writes it's browser
cache to home. Seems lame to back that up every night.

--
-Dan Young
-Parkrose School District