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