I have 10 windows boxes and 7 unix boxes on a LAN used by students. I 
want them each to be able to use any of the clients, but have some 
space of their own somewhere on the system. The disks I have on the 
unix boxes just aren't enough, so I want to let them use the D drives 
of the windows boxes and use sharity to mount them. But a problem 
arises if more than 10 clients attempt to share the same disk, because 
these windows boxes are just using w2k pro. Two approaches occur to me: 

1) Have the 7 unix boxes mount all 10 of the shared drives all the 
time, but have the windows boxes mount them dynamically when each user 
logs on, and unmount them when the user logs off. Since I'm putting two 
users on each disk, this would guarantee that each disk is never 
accessed by more than 9 clients, only two of which would actually be 
doing anything. 

I know how to do this, but I worry that there may be a performance 
problem. Anyone have a feeling about whether this would bog down the 
network? There would always be at least 70 sharings, maximum 80 
sharings, never more than 17 actually doing anything. Realistically, I 
think it would be rare that more than one sharing was really being used 
at a time, but then there would be a few times just after class when 10 
students would charge in and start downloading 5 gigs worth of data 
each.

2) Have all the clients mount dynamically, then the max # of sharings 
would be 17 for the entire net, which seems reasonable. This sounds 
better, but I don't know how to do it. Is there a way to use suid or 
something to have a system mount a volume when a user logs on and then 
unmount it when the user logs off? (No need to give a long explanation, 
just give me a clue so I can go google the answer.) This is one of 
those rare things that is easy on windows but I don't know whether it 
can be done at all on unix.

Any other approaches occur to anyone? Well, I guess we could always 
just buy some more big disks, but we have a budget problem at the 
moment.

thanks,

TDB

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