As I sort of mentioned in an aside in the last entry , pretty much any sort of fileserverinfrastructure does a number of other things besides just servingfiles. In turn this means that hooking a machine into your fileserverenvironment generally involves a lot more than just some mount commands.

For the purposes of this entry, let's ignore all of the services thatonly care about the fileservers themselves; backup, monitoring, and soon. We'll only look at the services that a client has to be tied

Sometimes it seems that system administration goes in cycles. Right nowthe cycle is moving back towards consolidation of services on fewermachines, so I want to talk about the advantages of using separatemachines (whether virtual or physical) for different services, insteadof putting them all on the same machine with various degrees of clevertricks.

(The genesis of this entry was a comment on this entry , talking about how one could use onemachine instead of two to do the job I was tackling.)

First off, it