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Hi Tony- I talked to Mike Schmidt and Tom about configuring your systems. Here's the scoop. The 500 Mhz system will be your NFS and data server as well as LDM ingester. On that system, you should create a 3GB partition on the first disk for the root partition (/), a 512 Mb partition for swap and the rest should be a data partition. For now, that would leave you 4.5 (assuming a 9GB) disk left for /data. You could call this /export/data because it will be the partition that will be exported to the other system. That should be plenty for now. At this point, there is no need to partition the other disk, but if you wanted to make part of if a partition for McIDAS data, and part for GEMPAK data. These could be mounted as /export/data/mcidas and /export/data/gempak. You could do something like 3GB each or 4 for McIDAS and 2-3 for GEMPAK (GEMPAK data takes up less room). On the client systems, again make the root partion 3 GB but on these have 2 127 MB swap partitions. As for user accounts, /home/gempak and /home/mcidas on the clients would be mounted to /home/gempak and /home/mcidas on the server. You could do this easily with the fstab file on the client. The general user account (wxuser?) home directory (ie: /home/wxuser) would be local to each machine. That way the different users would not interfere with each other. These accounts would access the binary and data files from the server since the home directories for gempak and mcidas are cross mounted. As for software, load in the entire operating system for both client and server instead of individual packages. You have plenty of disk space. For Solaris, you will need to download the gzip package and install it. It should install by default in /usr/local/bin. If so, you should create a link between /opt and /usr/local. You could even create a link between /local and /usr/local. You will also need to download gcc and perl. You can get all these from: http://www.sunfreeware.com/ If you need help during the installation or if I forgot one of your questions, you know where to find me. Don