From: medici@dorm.rutgers.edu (Mark Medici)
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.novell
Subject: Re: Windows 3.1
Date: 6 Apr 92 16:42:52 GMT
Organization: Rutgers Univ., New Brunswick, N.J.

USERLSF@UBCMTSG.BITNET (Les Ferch) writes:

|In an earlier message, I wrote:
|
|>>Should we be opting for diskless workstations and remote booting or
|>>should we buy hard disks for the PC's and run Windows from there?
|
|>Go for diskless stations and remote booting. However, you should get
|>workstations with LOTS of memory, enough to set up a decent size RAM
|>disk. Then you should set up Windows to write temp and swap files to
|>the RAM disk. We have done this in a lab of '486 PCs and feel that
|>it is easily the best solution.
|
|Bit of a slip there. By "diskless", I was thinking "without hard disk".
|The workstations should still have floppy drives so that students can
|take work with them or bring data from home or wherever.

There  is  clearly no "best"   way of  setting-up   Windows  for every
environment. Each method has advantages and disadvantages.  The trade-
offs  are usually ease-of-administration  versus performance  or cost.
Based  on my  experiences,  I agree  that the use   of  boot ROMs  can
simplify on-going administration of  workstations, but I disagree with
the concept of running Windows on a hard-diskless workstation.  Though
it is true  that you  can load a system up  with RAM and/or swap  to a
network drive, I believe it  is still important to  have a local  hard
disk for temp and swap files.

The  cost of a 40MB, 20ms  hard drive w/controller  (ATA/IDE) is about
the  same as 4MB of  RAM.  Though an 8MB   RAM disk would provide much
better  performance than a 40MB hard  disk, it  does  so with  1/5 the
capacity and at nearly  2x the cost.  Worse,  when the power fails  or
the system crashes,  (what,  Windows 3.1  crashes?), the contents of a
RAM disk  are irretrievably lost,  though temp/swap files on  a  fixed
disk usually have recoverable data in them.  And what happens when you
need  more than 8MB  of swap space?   Can you comfortably say that 8MB
will be enough for the life of the machine?  I can't.

I see the  use of server-based disk for  temp/swap files as a waste of
network resources.  Not  only does  one need to  set aside  10MB/work-
station, (which would  be  150 to 1,400MB   of disk per server  in our
environment), but there are performance and administration issues that
are affected.  The  performance of each  workstation will be adversely
affected when  that workstation needs to page  to a  server-based swap
file.  Depending on the number of workstations on the LAN, the network
traffic may require additional subnetting and NICs in the server.  The
overall  server  load will be  increased.   Unique swap  areas will be
required on the server for each workstation, and these areas will have
to be regularly policed to remove extranious files (which  can be done
automatically with some creative programming).

I find that a 33MHz i386DX with 4MB RAM (384kB set aside f/disk cache)
and 20MB of local fixed disk  space  (at 20ms) is  a good platform for
Windows.  An i486DX-33 with 8MB RAM (1MB set aside f/disk caching) and
40MB/20ms  drive is ideal.   Performance is greatest if Windows itself
is installed locally, though this does lead to administrative problems
(users trashing critical  Windows files).  Instead,  I  set Windows to
write TEMP/SWAP files locally, but put Windows  itself on  the server.
To help  prevent local drives from  getting  clogged with  user files,
we've written a utility that scrubs  unsanctioned files from  the disk
(all executables except  DOS and network  stuff are deleted each boot,
user data files are deleted after 20 days).

So, even though its possible to get by without a local hard, I tend to
believe a local hard disk for  temp and swap  space  provides the best
price/performance ratio.  Maybe  its just that I'm  too  used to  that
configuration.   Nevertheless,  the idea is not  uncommon;  most  UNIX
workstations also have local disks  for  the base operating system and
swap space,  even though they  too  can use a server  for  all storage
requirements.
-- 
------------------------------------------------------------------------
                                 Mark A. Medici / Systems Programmer III
                                 Rutgers University Computing Services
                                 <medici@gandalf.rutgers.edu>
Comments: Gated by NETNEWS@AUVM.AMERICAN.EDU