On Tue, Aug 24, 2004 at 08:32:19PM +0200, Danny Lieberman (Barak) wrote: > David, Didi > > Guys - unless thre is a compelling need for Mosix - e.g. compute-intensive > applications; there is no reason to go that way.
Care to tell why? David specifically talked about "better performance and load balance". But even if this isn't a very important goal, why not do it? Is it too much work? Does it cause damage (apart from running stuff not where you thought they will run, which sometimes might not be what you want, but that's the whole point of mosix)? I _can_ tell you the main reason we do not use it here is that one of the main uses for "distributed computing" here isn't simply to make things run faster, that is - to use it, but also to check how much faster they ran - that is, to develop/research this. Mosix can't easily tell you such things. With a batch queue, you simply run you app on 1,2,4,8,16 machines, and are sure that you had n machines for yourself each time, so that if e.g. 16 machines ran it 10 times faster than 1 you know it. With mosix all you know is that it probably made the best job in allocating the resources, but not that you actually had 16 machines (assuming you simply ran 16 processes and let mosix migrate them). > > The classic solution for a small 10 PC network is Samba and Pxes I know about pxes, and it's indeed cool, if it fulfills your needs, that is, if you want "thin clients". But from reading about it (I didn't try it) it's not a solution if what you want is a full-fledged Unix workstation, e.g. what you get when doing the default install of most of the general-purpose distros. > > 1) Samba for shared file system - way better manageability than nfs, you can > manage users, shares centrally But does it give all the semantics? I know samba supports "CIFS unix extensions", and that smbfs (cifs?) starts supporting this, but never tried it. Did anyone? Do we really have a decent alternative to NFS? > 2) Since you are concerned with configuration management I would recommend > PXES. (pxes.sourceforge.net ) > PXES is great - we have excellent experience with it for diskless > workstations and you can use rdesktop > if you need Windows Terminal Server integration. Care to describe a bit what you do with this? Do the users work on the machines or on a server (and the machines are mostly XTerminals)? What if you want to add software? > > Hope this helps -- Didi ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
