On Wed, 2013-01-23 at 01:54 -0700, James Stroud wrote: > On Jan 22, 2013, at 11:20 PM, Nat Echols wrote: > > The real difficulty is integrating Macs into a > > Linux-centric environment, for example configuring NFS, NIS, etc. > > That's because NFS and NIS are antiquities left over from the days of > mainframes. Distributed file systems and user information databases > are designed for an environment of many workers and few machines, when > the typical graphics workstation cost $50,000. These days, we argue > whether to spend an extra $200 on a $500 computer. We have moved to a > new paradigm: many workers with many more machines, with each machine > having essentially mainframe levels of storage and computing power.
Technically there is something in what you say as a pattern for day-to-day work (for some people, although not all), but I think that describing the debate in terms of modern vs. antiquated is missing the point completely. The real difference between local vs. centralised storage is to do with responsibility for the hardware and the data that it contains. Local workstation storage is OK for the following kinds of cases: (i) the data that are stored locally have no value, so it doesn't matter if they are lost (either through hardware failure, misbehaving software or accidental deletion). (ii) the user has the expertise and the time to set up and maintain a strategy for recovering data that are lost from local disks (iii) the institution that the user works for allows the user to include data on local workstation disks in the institution's regular backup operations When none of these apply, there is a real, contemporary case for using something like NFS, where the storage is centrally maintained and backed up. The cost of storage has fallen of course, but what that means is that the real questions now are about the value of the data. In some fields, you could store your entire career's data on a few USB memory sticks, but I doubt that many people would want to do that without having made other copies somewhere else, and the same applies to local workstation storage too :-). There are other considerations in favour of connecting a workstation to networked services: if you use more than one machine it can be an incredible pain to be constantly moving data around from one to the other, and to keep track of what the authoritative versions are. Having independent, local user id's and passwords on every workstation can also cause difficulties. I could go on.... > In other words, instead of NFS, you should run git. This is simply not an option for many crystallographers, who do not have a background in software development or data management. Advocating and supporting git (or indeed any content/version management system) for those kind of users is a losing battle: they see it as an unnecessary complication to their daily work, and will avoid using it as far as they can. Regards, Peter. -- Peter Keller Tel.: +44 (0)1223 353033 Global Phasing Ltd., Fax.: +44 (0)1223 366889 Sheraton House, Castle Park, Cambridge CB3 0AX United Kingdom
