On Wed, Feb 06, 2002 at 01:48:07PM -0600, Jima wrote: > I also somewhat wonder how efficient read-only NFS would be, compared > to FTP/HTTP. Anyway, that would work so long as you mirrored most of > the distributions, hopefully including updates. Depends on what you'd like to do. Let's take a Debian installation for example. apt uses a number of sources to install packages: ftp, http, cdrom, file, etc. To install the package, dpkg needs to find the *.deb on the local file system somewhere. If we're using http or ftp, we need to actually copy those *.debs to cache (/var/cache/apt/archives). If we can access these files from an NFS mounted directory, this copy phase is eliminated. You can see that comparing an NFS install to an FTP install is no longer apples-to-apples. The I/O savings are enormous. Now, that's not to say that NFS is more efficient on the network than either HTTP or FTP. Simply put, it's not. There are many more RPC calls that NFS needs to make, so the client and server are positively chatty. TCP for FTP and HTTP may certainly be lean in comparison, but you have to incorporate the larger picture of the task at hand to see the real comparisons. For network-based installs, a read-only package mirror is definitely the way to go. Back to the grind. -- Chad Walstrom <chewie at wookimus.net> | a.k.a. ^chewie http://www.wookimus.net/ | s.k.a. gunnarr Get my public key, ICQ#, etc. $(mailx -s 'get info' chewie at wookimus.net) -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 232 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://shadowknight.real-time.com/pipermail/tclug-list/attachments/20020206/4c122922/attachment.pgp