Dear AMMRL;
We bought a Dell workstation to be used as a remote server to our ~150 NMR
clients running VNMR6.1C on 5 workstations. VNMRJ is installed patched and
running on the data server (RHEL 4 Enterprise). The current design plan
for our Linux data server is to set it up as a central data store for user
files generated from the individual Sun workstations using NFS. That would
also include setting it up as a central account server (NIS) so that users
who login to one of the Sun workstations will authenticate to their user
account credentials on our Linux server at which time their data storage
space on it will be auto-mounted by the NMR-workstation as a place for them
to write their data files.
Our users each have local accounts on each of the workstations because the
VNMR stores instrument specific configuration files in each user account
that would make centralizing them difficult. The plan is to authenticate
against the Linux data server. Users would be encouraged to save their data
to their /export/home/username space (thus storing it on the server) and we
could make that easier for them by either creating a link to that space as
/home/username/data or just mounting their data-server directory as
/home/username/data or /home/username/intrument/data. When a user logs out
of an instrument, it auto-unmounts from the data server.
We have been having issues getting a test user to automount/unmount using
NFS although we can manually mount it. With 150 users, not unmounting the
server every logout in short time, will sure kill it, so manual mount is
not an option (unless scripted perhaps).
When we get the system past this part of the process we will order an
external drive bay to house hot-swappable RAID drives.
I would appreciate any thoughts from those who have had remote archiving
success with a Linux workstation and what ideas you might have to make these
global changes.
Robert Harker
Engineer
University of Florida
Department of Chemistry
NMR Laboratories
Gainesville, Florida 32611-7200
Business Phone 352-392-4650
FAX 352-392-8758
Received on Tue Jun 26 2007 - 11:19:46 MST