[ On Sat, November 22, 1997 at 06:22:15 (-0800), Greg Earle wrote: ]
> Subject: Cost of disk (was: Re: Weird hang on pentium-133 running 1.3_ALPHA)
>
> I was originally going to respond "Geez, a 1 Gb disk costs US ~ $100 now,
> assign ``Diskless Client'' to the 80's, and surely a student can save up $100".

Diskless clients might be diskless for one or more of several reasons:

	- sometimes there's just no interface to plug disks into

	- they usually reboot without need to shut down

	- no need to fsck after a crash (both this and the previous
	point make them good for some types of kernel hacking).

	- *far* easier to manage, esp. if you've got dozens or hundreds

	- no need to backup many machines -- just one, the server

They have a tiny advantage over X terminals for non-kernel hacking too
in that they can run the applications and general purpose operating
systems, but they are more difficult to manage than just plain X
terminals in that they could potentially chew up just about as much
system administration overhead as a stand-alone machine.

-- 
							Greg A. Woods

+1 416 443-1734			VE3TCP			robohack!woods
Planix, Inc. <woods@planix.com>; Secrets Of The Weird <woods@weird.com>