Managing Systems and Workgroups: A Guide for HP-UX System Administrators

Planning a Workgroup
Choosing a File-Sharing Model
Chapter 2 57
• Security:
— Easy to protect physically (e.g, in a locked computer room).
— Allows you to keep sensitive data (or all data) off the desktop.
Disadvantages • Large system required, possibly with multiple processors:
— Special power and climate requirements.
• Fragile:
— If system crashes, or is down for maintenance, no one works.
— Failure of any component likely to affect everyone.
• Inflexible:.
— Can’t easily redistribute load in response to changing (or
miscalculated) use and performance.
Summary This model may be the right one for you if you have, or can afford to buy,
a high-powered system, and your users are all using the same
applications to manipulate data that can be stored centrally, not
parcelled out onto local disks. If this is the case, your users do not have to
forgo the advantages of windowing: XTerminals provide the same display
capabilities as workstation monitors.
Even if this model is not suitable in its pure form, you may well want to
use it in combination with a more distributed approach; for example, you
may want at least some of your users to have workstations on their
desks, but still allow them (or require them) to log in to a high-powered
“application server” to run applications that need the memory, MIPS,
disk space or other resources of a big system; or you might deploy your
applications across two or three high-end workstations and have users
log in to those to run them.
NFS Diskless Model
The term NFS Diskless describes systems that use special features of
NFS to share the root file system. (Diskless means that the clients do
not require a disk; in practice, many “diskless” workstations have at least
one disk). In this document, we use the term to refer specifically to the
HP implementation of NFS Diskless.