Hello managers,
I am trying to get some input and openion on whether or not I should
convert our stand-alone Alphas runing OSF into a client/server setup.
I appreciate any comment or suggestion.
Here is the situation:
We have only 8 Alpha boxes running stand-alone Digital Unix. These are
mostly installed in individual offices. What I am trying to do it to
make my life as sysadmin easier when it comes to installing and upgrading
third party software and layered products. This is getting a bit
difficault as we are purchasing about 4 alpha/osf boxes per year, and I
have only 1-2 hours per day to spend on these boxes.
The users are pretty happy with the current sitation. They have no
problem buying additional hard disk to install all the programs they
need locally, and they are frightened with the possibility of not having
access to their favorate application because of network or server
failures. Furthermore, we don't have much use for YP at this time
because each user has his own Alpha box.
What I was thinking was to try to nfs mount non-essential applications
(e.g. Web browsers, news readers, xv, ghostview, etc) from a server and
leave the essential software (e.g. compilers and editors) on the local
machine.
Is there a way to eliminate NFS timeout problems which hang the cleint
sometimes for minutes in case of a network outage. I want the users to
be able to continue their work using the local applications. Mounting
the file system using background option or using automount does not seem
to solve the problem (e.g. user tries to access an application in
/usr/local and this hangs the system for a long period of time)
Again, thanks for any suggestions, comments and insights you can
provide.
Kevin Behrooz
Received on Wed Jun 05 1996 - 17:13:47 NZST