Lot's and Lot's of PC's

[Mark A. Maxwell]

In article <9294 at brazos.Rice.edu> shani at math.tau.ac.il writes:
>
>Believe it or not, but we plan to support 100 (!) PC's with PC/NFS. Is
>this possible at all? and if it is, what is the minimal
>number/configuration of servers we will need?

PC/NFS is not in most cases a real hog of a server's resources.  It all
depends upon what you are planning to do with it though and what else
lives on the LAN.  One area in which we use it is in conjunction with
Cadnetix schematic capture. Eight PCs run off of two basically stand alone
CAD Sun 3/60 141MB HD.  The 3/60s are not real servers but rather they are
dedicated PCB design seats which happen to ship their component libraries
to the PCs via NFS.  This environment does not even phase the 3/60
applications.

Elsewhere we use PC/NFS to provide PC users plenty of disk space that
actually gets backed up! A true floppy-less FULL backup of a PC harddisk
can be achieved if you set aside some extra server disk space for this
purpose and run a PC utility such as "Fastback."  The results are pretty
neat.  We use a seperate server disk partition where users can backup,
then an archive dump is done once a week and the partition is cleaned out.

Lastly other services you might wish to support such as e-mail and telnet
logins are a consideration.  

Okay so to answer your question based on no knowledge of what you want to
do.  I'd break'em up into work groups of say a max of (20) PCs per server,
so you need (5) servers, but they don't have to be "real" servers if they
are only supporting PCs.  Depending on how much disk you want to hand out
to each PC you could even go with smaller work groups of say (10) PCs
hanging off of SLCs, Sun 4/20s with a Good ol' 3rd party external 400+ MB
HD.  That would give each PC somewhere around 30MB on the server.

itzzall4phun-      uunet!philabs!contel0!maxz         Contel IPC , Stamford CT