NIS?

Greg Lindahl lindahl at conservativecomputer.com
Thu Oct 4 15:43:45 PDT 2001


> > 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.
> 
> Before bashing NIS completely, maybe a qualifier of "sucks on Linux"
> would be appropriate? I ran NIS with one master and 50 slaves in a Solaris

I think the qualifier in question is "big". The bank I mentioned had
130 Solaris machines, and never wanted to see an NIS related
delay. You seem to have both smaller clusters, and maybe less
fanaticism when it comes to delays.

BTW, by slaves, do you mean "slave servers" or "clients"? There's a
big difference. Having lots of slave servers means a push takes a
while, but queries are uniformly fast. Having lots of clients and
parallel jobs means... exactly what Don said would happen, on any OS.

But, at the end of the day, if you want to run NIS, go right
ahead.

greg




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