Date: Tue, 9 Jul 2002 00:19:59 -0400 (EDT) From: Tim Kellers <timothyk@serv1.wallnet.com> To: Matthew Seaman <m.seaman@infracaninophile.co.uk> Cc: <questions@freebsd.org>, <kellers@njit.edu> Subject: Re: NFS/NIS... arg! Message-ID: <20020709000957.U94254-100000@serv1.wallnet.com> In-Reply-To: <20020707184159.GA22493@happy-idiot-talk.infracaninophi>
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Mathew.... Thanks for the response: very informative and full of good news that NFS/NIS might not be the culprit in my network sluggishness. Both the NIS master and slave servers are Dell Poweredge 2500's with 1 gig of Ram and dual 1 GHZ processors; the NFS server is the master NIS server --again, 2 processors, 1 GHZ , one gig of RAM. The NIS master/NFS server (Intel EtherExpress 10/100 NIC) is attached to a 100MBs switched port --IP address xxx.xxx.192.182, the slave server (same hardware) has an IP addres of xxx.xxx.198.13. The lab workstations all have IP addresses in the xxx.xxx.220.0/24 range. The lab workstations are all Dell Poweredge 1300/1400 machines with 800Mhz single processors and 256MB of RAM. I suppose something might be amiss in the network topology; I'll have to investigate, further. Thanks again. Tim Kellers CPE/NJIT On Sun, 7 Jul 2002, Matthew Seaman wrote: > On Sun, Jul 07, 2002 at 12:04:55AM -0400, Tim Kellers wrote: > > > I've got courses to teach FreeBSD in FreeBSD coming up Real Soon Now. > > I've set up our instructional lab to use NIS/NFS from a master server so > > that all the student UID's are authenticated from the same server and have > > their home directories mounted on the same, central, server. > > > The problem is that the NIS/NFS combination is way too slow. It's far > > from "snappy" in the command line environment and in Desktop mode (one of > > the last sections in the curriculum is "Advanced Desktops") loading is so > > slow it's as though time itself has stopped. > > I've run desktop systems in exactly this way for a company of about 50 > people --- 30ish using Unix desktops of various types and the rest > WinNT mounting filesystems via Samba. The file server was an old Sun > E250 (dual proc, 1Gb RAM, about 70Gb disk space under ODS), and had a > couple of 400MHz AMD k6-2 FreeBSD boxes running NIS+DNS, plus some > other similar boxes running firewalls, mail servers etc. > > Performance was fine. No huge problem with responsiveness, although > you could tell the difference when lots of people were working. > > However, that was because the servers, slow as they might seem > nowadays, were up to the task. Trying to run NFS on a machine without > enough grunt is horrible. You need plenty of memory and good internal > IO bandwidth so you can suck files off the disk and out of the network > port efficiently. Processor speed isn't such a huge factor. > > You should have a master and at least one clone NIS server --- if NIS > isn't performing well, everything will grind to a halt. Much like the > effect you get when you can't contact a DNS server. > > It was also my observation that not all systems are created equal when > it comes to being NIS or NFS servers. I found that FreeBSD made a > good NIS server OS for various other flavours of Unix (including Linux) > and Solaris was pretty good at serving NFS to anything --- although > that choice was determined more by the capacity of the hardware. This > was several years ago now, so your milage may vary. > > It's also important for top performance of this sort of network to > have the server and clients close by in network terms and to have a > network without significant collisions or packet loss. > > > Are there any alternatives to the NIS/NFS combo in FreeBSD land? I've > > heard from some of the SUN admins in the University that AFS is far > > superior to NFS in handling remote home directoried and that it's > > "tolerable" in loading remote desktops (KDE --yes I know it's an I/O > > resource hog-- in particular). > > I believe that AFS is more resistant to non-ideal conditions than NFS, > but it's still going to put a similar load profile onto the servers. > > Cheers, > > Matthew > > -- > Dr Matthew J Seaman MA, D.Phil. 26 The Paddocks > Savill Way > Tel: +44 1628 476614 Marlow > Fax: +44 0870 0522645 Bucks., SL7 1TH UK > > To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org > with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message > To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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