Favorite operating systems query

[Tom Haapanen]

>> ...  There's no graceful way with UNIX to add a machine and not find that
>> you have to segregate some users from others.

>     The above is not really true with respect to UNIX any longer.
>Several vendors offer working distributed file systems for UNIX.
>For example, NFS from SUN and TRFS from Integrated Solutions both
>allow easy expansion to new machines without segregating users.  
>Also, Todd Brunhoff's RFS is included with 4.3 BSD, and has been
>distributed to the network.  It works with both 4.2 BSD and 4.3 BSD.
>Even AT&T will eventually release their RFS for System V Release 3.
>UNIX today, especially BSD UNIX, is much more sophisticated in this
>area than it was a few years ago.

Supposedly SCO's just-announced XENIX-Net (developed with Microsoft who
will sell it for the 68000 and other non-brain-damaged architectures)
will provide transparent file sharing between a number of XENIX machines,
using Sytek cards or something equivalent.

Even just using Ethernet to hook up a bunch of VAXen without file sharing
doesn't really amount to segregation.  At University of Waterloo, we had
over a dozen VAXen (plus uVAXen etc.) hooked together.  You didn't feel
segregated, because it was very easy to do things over the network: rcp
(remote copy), rlogin, rsh, rwho and other commands make things easy.  Mail
would figure out what machine the recipient was on, and full-screen talk
between machines made it really feel like just one big system.  If I had
to do some big makes or something, I'd find the machine with the smallest
load, rcp the files over, do my work, and rcp the results back (no need
to type in any passwords: your .rhosts file defined the authorized users).
This was all running on all kinds of VAXen (uVAX, uVAX2, 750, 780, 785,
8600) using 4.2 BSD and Ultrix.

--
\tom haapanen					looking glass software ltd.
syncro at looking.UUCP				waterloo, ontario, canada
watmath!looking!syncro				(519) 884-7473

"These opinions are solely mine, although even I would like to deny them..."