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[next article]The Agricultural Engineering department has increased the access to Sun workstations by adding terminals to both our Sun 3/280 fileserver, stable and her seven clients, appaloosa, arabian, belgian, clyesdale, morgan, palomino, and pinto. We currently have thirty-two serial ports on a fileserver that are connected to both office and public terminals. Each client sits in a public terminal room and has two serial ports that support clerical terminals. The terminals allow more people to use the Suns without waiting to sit in front of a work-station screen. Overall the performance has been good. However, response time does increase noticeably whenever a secretary starts up more than one troff job or when a student is heavily using windows at the client's console.
Increasing access to the Suns has become important in the Agricultural Engineering department because Sun accounts have been given to all of our faculty, staff, grad students and undergraduates. All new accounts for the undergrads were set up with their mail delivered to the fileserver, so they have to log onto it to read their mail. The fileserver is considered their home machine. Some sites do not allow logins on their fileserver, but in our case we do.
About 1/3 of our staff is now using the fileserver as their home machine. Over this past November, the fileserver has had about fifteen concurrent logins in the afternoons. Usually about ten users were connected to the server through the serial ports on the fileserver and about five users were "rlogin'd" from either a client or Vax.
Each workstation has the computations speed and memory size of a Vax 11/780 at a size and price that allows several to be placed in a terminal room. Since a Vax can handle about forty concurrent users, we certainly expect each client to be able to provide faster service to three concurrent users than a Vax running the same jobs. In most cases this expectation has proven true. However, at times the Suns do not seem to have the "lugging power" of a Vax; only a couple of concurrent jobs seem to make them crawl. Suns were designed to perform their best with one user per client, whereas the Vax was designed to perform better with more users. Overall, the addition of terminals to Suns is a very prudent way to increase computer access to more users.
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