NIS?

[Steven Timm]

> Don Becker gave some good reasons why NIS isn't used by most big
> clusters. The investment bank I used to work for (5 years ago) made
> every machine a slave in order to avoid NIS's braindamage.
>

The problem with making every machine a slave (which we have tried) is
that eventually the periodic yppusshes themselves load down the net--plus
you still get timeouts even then.

Here at Fermilab we have found that NIS starts breaking down when you
have about 100-150 nodes.  We are moving to a system of shoving out
password files with rdist..although our situation is easier than
most because we don't have to push every time someone changes
a password--these are handled with Kerberos.

Steve