All the disks attached to all the different workstations can be accessed from any workstation or the Convex via the automounter. For example, if you are logged into PUPPIS, you can see the file systems on APUS by typing, say,
However, there is a right and a wrong way to use this cross mounting. There is a large network penalty if you attempt to write to a remotely mounted disk. For example, if you try to write to a disk on APUS while logged into PUPPIS. However, the penalty is smaller if you attempt to read from a remotely mounted disk. In general, you should try to maintain your files on the disks of one workstation, and remain logged into that workstation. If you are forced to access files from a remotely mounted disk, always make sure you read from that disk, do not write to it.
Remember also that when you access a remotely mounted file system, the workstation on which those file systems belong will be impacted also. Several daemons will start up in order to provide the service which transfers the data to or from your recipient file system. Thus, consider users on the other workstations when operating across the network.
Finally, note that AIPS often generates scratch files. In many tasks you have control over which disks these scratch files do not go to via the baddisk adverb. Thus, if you have started AIPS such that you have remotely mounted disks available (which you should read from only), you can set baddisk to point at these disks so that AIPS will be dissuaded from writing scratch files to them. Scratch files are often very large and the penalty for not doing this can be enormous.
Last update: 27/11/93
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