On 10/06/98 17:19:32 you wrote:
>I know that Net App filers and Auspexes are more reliable than Sun's
>however in practice the difference is minimal. I also know that they
>are faster but in practice it isn't so noticeable. We do everything we
>can to avoid NFS e.g. cachefs, and most of our users seem to be of the
>save and forget variety so we don't really need the performance either.
It just goes to show that there are a lot of different environments out
there. :)
You don't specify exactly what sort of environment you have, but it sounds
like it's very low key. You obviously aren't concerned with heavy Internet
traffic, multiuser loads, email delivery, database or CAD simulations, etc.
Sure, I could see where if you just need a server to store user files,
primarily documents and a small amount of email and the like, an ordinary
Sun or NT server would be just fine. And since your space needs aren't as
great either (generally) in such environments, you probably view disk storage
very differently.
>Price will probably dictate most which way we go in future and CIFS is
>a big incentive but on alternate wednesdays I still favour Sun's.
I'm surprised you mentioned price, since the impression I'm getting is
that you wouldn't be adverse to paying more for a standard, good ol' Sun
that you all know and love. But my previous guess as to your environment
may be way off, so what do I know? :)
>| In an odd way, since UNIX has generally done without ACLs for so long,
>| most places that I know of who could use them don't, since it's not
>| really necessary and it's not going to be interoperate well in a
>| heterogeneous environment. So I don't know of many customers who would
>| decide that they were going to rollout widespread ACL use and switch
>| all of their servers over to Sun to accomodate this.
>
>I would definitely use ACL's if I could but 90% of our file storage is
>on machines that don't support them. I also like to use better security,
>same story.
I'm curious what exactly you would use them for - just intellectual
curiosity, mind you, not the argumentative kind. Is security a problem
currently? Will ACLs solve a particular problem with sharing files
among users you're currently running into? Or do you plan to use it as
a basis of a new file-sharing architecture? Do you anticipate any
difficulty in getting users to use ACLs, and use them correctly?
I haven't seen many UNIX environments heavily use ACLs, so I'm curious
as to what people are envisioning. I'm familiar with how they are
commonly used on the NT side, but the needs there are different.
Bruce