sun servers inflexible ??

[Eric Y.W. Ho]

I was thinking the other day why Sun made their servers also as
fileservers as well.  I mean if they can decouple the file serving part
from other services then I think that we may have a more fault-tolerant &
more flexible environment.  The decoupling I'm talking about is actually a
subsystem that understands nothing but file/disk related things/requests.
I think that current Sun servers takes on too much -- sometimes they act
as terminal, cpu, file, ..etc... servers all in one and when the server
crash, everything (at least its clients) are frozen.  If you've a
subsystem that only do storing & retrieving things to/from disks then it
probably will be less likely to crash and because you store all system
binaries/libraries/source/database files on disks, the clients may still
be able to function normally when the server is down (assuming that
various system services -- e.g. yp, is replicated elsewhere on the net --
probably need some reworking at the kernel to make the clients not to
"stick so close" to their primary server).  This way one can easily
reconfigure one's desktop on-the-fly and one can reboot the server (e.g.
doing experiments on the server) anytime one wanted.  By decoupling the
fileserver from the server, one can also make a mirror image for even more
fault-tolerance.  This way even if everything around you is crashing, you
can still do things as normal on your diskless or dataless desktop.

Eric Ho
Princeton Cognitive Science Lab.,	Princeton University
email = eho at phoenix.princeton.edu	phone = 609-987-2819 (x2987)

regards.

-eric-