On Oct 10,  2:05pm, David Maxwell wrote:
} On Sat, Oct 10, 1998 at 12:48:03AM -0700, John Nemeth wrote:
} > On Oct 3,  9:02pm, Greg A. Woods wrote:
} 
} > } absolutley no trouble figuring out which is which.  All the world's not
} > } a PC, luckily.  I feel almost as little compassion for PC users as I do
} > } for users of Microsoft products.  They made their choice -- let'm burn!
} > 
} >      No, but most of it is, and that's reality.  I don't like the
} > design of PC's either.  But, we don't have the luxury of designing and
} > building our own hardware, so we have to work with what's out there.
} 
} Today. That may very well change, with the rise and fall of various chip
} makers. Good design is good design, if i386 can't accomodate it completely,
} that doesn't mean all of NetBSD should suffer, even if i386 is the most
} popular/widely used port. I think many people here believe in the portable
} design model, or they'd have started running some other single platform OS.

     Yes, I agree.  This is one of the reasons that I run NetBSD,
instead of FreeBSD.  I feel that by being portable, NetBSD is closer
to the true spirit of UNIX.  I realise that this is a religious issue,
but so what.  Although, all of NetBSD shouldn't suffer because of the
i386 port, it must still be considered in any decision that affects
portability.

} > } advantage of suggestions such as David Maxwell's to think about here
} > } too.
} > 
} >      I don't recall what his suggestion was off-hand.
} 
} Applying a label to a disk (or partition) and teaching mount to
} do something like 'mount -l wwwmaindisk_a' (or :a, as you suggested in
} a later message.) I'm not sure if you were thinking of this before I

     Actually, somebody else suggested it first, I just incorporated
it into my ideas.

} brought it up or after, your message wasn't a reply to mine.

     After.  I just summarised the ideas floating around and added
some of my own.

} btw, I'd still appreciate from anyone a good pointer to an example of the
} kvm_open stuff. Basically, I want to read the kernel linked list 'disklist'

     I did take a looke, but I didn't find any simple examples.  I
suggest you look at the source for things like ps, w, top, skill, etc.

} Well, box horsepower is a tricky thing to discuss, since it really
} depends on how the procudure is designed. Just take a look at the
} distributed encryption cracking going on... There may not be a box
} 'powerful' enough to do the job... but the job still gets done.

     This is not a realistic example.  You can't run an enterprise
level mission critical application like this.  In fact, you can't run
any business application like this.  Yes, businesses do successfully
use distributed computing, but not on this scale, and they need much
more reliable nodes and networks.

}-- End of excerpt from David Maxwell