[geeks] what is the world coming to...

Joshua D Boyd jdboyd at cs.millersville.edu
Wed Apr 10 00:24:45 CDT 2002


On Tue, Apr 09, 2002 at 10:07:34PM -0700, Peter L. Wargo wrote:
> On Tuesday, April 9, 2002, at 09:55 PM, Joshua D Boyd wrote:
> 
> >I don't know how they can be so stingy with disk space.
> 
> Shared disk space is expen$ive.  Not like going down to Fry's and buying 
> an IDE disk.  Gotta have support for it, backups, RAID/mirroring, etc.  
> We have this argument at work.

I hadn't thought of that.  Maybe the strict limits are so they can fit all
the students directories onto 1 4gig dat tape.  300 students, 7 megs apiece.
That's (* 300 7) only 2.1 gigs, even if all the students are using their full
capacity.  I think the department size is 300 students.  Maybe that is 300
students per year though.  OK, I looked it up.  350 new students each year,
so about 1400 students (* 1400 7).  So, 9.8gigs, if every student fills their
available space, which most don't see they are MS weenies trying to avoid
linux as much as possible.  Heck, most people, given a linux assignment, sit
in the 2k lab and exceed over to a linux machine.  

My understanding is that the linux file server is a new (purchased fall 2k1) 
machine with multiple 18gig drives, but could be wrong.  I know it was a 
fairly large machine.  Lets see if I can look at dmesg here...
Oh crap.  This machine is using an IDE CD-ROM.  Yetch.
Lets see.  2 18gig IBM drives on 1 scsi controller.  No raid or 
mirroring.  And for some reason the scsi controllers are flooding the
the message logs, but they don't exactly look like error messages.  So,
there you have it.  Ample disk space for users to have more than 7megs.
Also, the tape drive in the machine is a DDS-4 autoloader.  But, that doesn't
guarantee that that is actually the drive used for backups.

-- 
Joshua D. Boyd



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