🚀 go-pugleaf

Tim Bradshaw <tfb@cley.com> wrote in message
news:ey3ogae44zd.fsf@cley.com...
> * Trevor Best wrote:
> > In NT you can stitch together several disks into one using either volume
> > striping or RAID-0 striping. Partitiion Magic seems to be able to do the
> > same thing and make this transparent to the OS, this is rather a
permanent
> > step compared to mounting volumes under unix. The unix mount points are
such
> > because there's no concept of separate disks/volumes, just one large
> > one.
>
> But this is absolutely irrelevant.  Quite apart from the fact that
> any serious Unix can do RAID, it just doesn't solve the problem.

Problem? I've not seen it as a problem.

> The problem is that I have, say 20 fileservers and 400 workstations.
> And I want the users of the system to see a filespace which
> corresponds to *their* needs, and never to have to know which bits
> come from which fileserver.  I also want this setup to be centrally
> managed, and ideally I want to be able to change associations on the
> fly. I want people to see names like /project/clim/work and /home/tfb,
> and *not* file://fs11/clim/work and file://fs09/tfb.  The nerest that you
seem
> to be able to get to this in windows is centrally maintaining a bunch
> of `mounts' (whatever it calls it) so you have a global association of
> logical places with drive letters -- your home dir is always `H:' or
> whatever.  So you can get maybe 22 possible locations with basically
> random names.  Ick.

I've not come across anyone who needs to be able to see that many servers
simultaneously, are these users so superhuman that they can multitask as
good as a computer? Any competent dos/windows/Novell administrator can
create a central place where users can spawn off processes, unmap drives and
re-map new ones, the users need not know what is what and most users don't
know what a drive is let alone a subdirectory and they don't need to. You
only need see what you're doing.

I'm not saying the drive letter aproach is better or worse, it's different
and there are different ways of tackling any given problem, as for what you
want users to see I don't agree, most users would barf at /project/clim/work
just as much as they would f:\, g:\ or \\servername\share\dir

The beginning of this thread started with Current Bun readers and their
level of intelligence (as made famous by Jasper Carrot), now do think they
can handle directory names in any format?

> VMS incidentally had logical names to deal wit this kind of thing.
> VMS was a lot more sophisticated than Windows seems to be...

Of course it was, it was designed from the ground up to be multi-user and
multi-tasking, unlike dos, which came from a different background entirely,
what the "P" stands for in "PC". Unix was designed along the same lines as
VMS albeit to be more open (VMS being proprietary to DEC, as were most
minicomputer and mainframe OSs)

I'm not trying to say Windows is better than linux, I woudn't say that. I
only state facts gained from personal experiences. Sure Windows is inferior
to linux as an OS but not as much as most of the linux comunity seems to
think. I will defend it as far as I think it's reasonable too from people
who say things about it that are untrue or unfounded. A lot of linux users
in this group seem to have extreamly high horses to sit on and slag windows
off from. I'm here to put them straight as much as I can. Similarly I will
do the same for any Windows user who slags off linux if any of them dared. I
have the same thing to do Oracle users slag off SQL Server or vice versa,
each product has it's good points and bad. No one product is better overall,
it's all swings and roundabouts.


--
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trevor@easynet.co.uk
http://www.trevor.easynet.co.uk