On Fri, Aug 08, 2003 at 11:46:41AM -0400, seth vidal wrote: > Not with disks as big as they are these days and as cheap. > > push it ALL on the local disk and be done with it. That's essentially what we are doing now. Back when a SPARCstation had about 500MB of disk, one couldn't even fit the GNU tools in /usr/local. Today the smallest disk one can reasonably order in quantity is probably 18GB. OTOH, we have lots of machines that have 9GB SCSI drives in them, and it goes quickly once one installs all of the interesting math/scientific packages (Octave, R, Maxima, Scilab, OpenDX, Texmacs, three Common Lisps, four Schemes, two Haskells, ...). I'd like to be able to use my spare local disk for (1) scratch space for the above programs, and (2) a distributed filesystem like Ivy. In the end, you are probably right -- buy 60GB drives and the problem goes away. Regards, Bill Rugolsky
