I'm wondering how realistic netbooting will be in terms of server load and speed. I recently opened a little business in Montana with four iMacs connected through a 100BT Asante switch onto a DSL line for public access/gaming etc. ALREADY, I'm having a bear of a time keeping those iMacs maintained. Since I do webhosting too, I'm thinking of buying X Server when its out and pumping all my services through it on my B&W G3. Can X Server handle all that load on one machine or should I divide up services.... thoughts?? Thanks.

[macman]

I don't know anything about X server. But, I highly doubt that just 4 iMacs will cause any problems over 100BaseT Ethernet. If they can do it with over 50 it should work with 4.

If anything, NetBoot should make your life as an administrator of public machines ~easier~. Based on what I've read of its design, it should be more secure than At Ease and much easier to maintain.

Depending on how much time you spend maintaining your iMacs, it may or may not be a good investment for a small business. If you spend more than an hour a week or so, and value your time at around $20/hour or more, it would probably end up saving you money over the course of a year... and certainly aggravation--once it's set up.

I manage about 40 Macs in a non-profit organization in Boston. If testing goes well, I hope/expect to start moving new machines/users to NetBooted iMacs. I've already put in place 100BaseT support infrastructure for our other G3s, so we'll have fast pipes to the iMacs, and am willing to drop Gigabit Ethernet into the server and central switch to maximize network speed to NetBooted machines. If they don't run as fast as machines with hard drives, users won't use them.

If all goes well, I expect to have this place to be entirely netbooted within four years.


Rob Mohns, Systems Manger, Jobs for the Future, Boston, Massachusetts

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Rob Mohns * Designer *
Geek * Et Ceter

Netbooting is a very realistic option, especially for only 4 iMacs over a 100Mbps connection. MacOS X server will have no problem with this relativly 'low' workload.

Also, Netbooting will make your life as a systems administrator much easier, because you will now only have to manage 1 MacOS: the one on the server that will be distributed to the clients that connect.

Keep your eyes peeled for MacOS X server. It is going to be the begining of great things from Apple!

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90% of the people that
use computers could trade
them in for a word
processor and a Sony
Playstation. They other
10% use a Macin

OS X Server is an industrial strength OS. Netbooting creates a rather large network load when the machines startup, but after that it drops off dramatically. As for web hosting, Apache on OS X Server really flies. Apache is a hella fast web server, and even the unoptimized build on DR2 was really fast... Another great option is LinuxPPC, if you really want raw power... What will be interesting is if we are allowed to benchmark MOSXS (some products, like MS SQL Server, do not allow benchmarking in the license agreements) against LinuxPPC...

I facilitated a little test with a beta of X on a standard 400mhz G3. We ran 5 iMacs and one blue tower over a 100bt net. It ran fast, and reliably, even running Win98 with Virtual PC was fairly snappy. It could change a whole business model for us, but licensing will be a bear.

So, would ~12 G3/400 Macs on 100base-t intranet (VLAN) pose any foeseeable problems? We are looking at putting production G3/400's on this to keep them as close as possible for graphic arts producion.

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Macintosh: We may not be perfect, but at
least we knew the year 2000 was coming

[bkoch]

I just saw a life demo of netbooting at CeBIT'99. Booting up two iMacs simultaneously used up 12% of CPU time of the server, and I think it does not get much higher when more clients are booted simultaneously. I was not able to see the network load, though.