NIS?

Patrick Geoffray patrick at myri.com
Thu Oct 4 16:55:17 PDT 2001


Tim Carlson wrote:
> 
> On Thu, 4 Oct 2001, Greg Lindahl wrote:
> 
> > 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
> environment (2.5 -> 2.8) for 5 years and can't think of one problem
> (outside the time we tried to add a slave and did it incorrectly).
> 
> Ran NIS on a 32 node Linux cluster based on RedHat 6.2 for six
> months and never had a problem with NIS.

The problem is not about NIS working or not, it works.
The discussion is about NIS sucking or not, i.e. being 
a bottleneck for job spawning. 
Actually, it is, but it may not be a problem for you, and 
that's fine.

My experience is that it's much more efficient to make all of 
the nodes slaves or to propagate the updated files by hand, 
than to put the NIS server on his knees.

Patrick

-----------------------------------------------------------
|   Patrick Geoffray, Ph.D.      patrick at myri.com         |
|   Myricom, Inc.                http://www.myri.com      |
|   Cell: 865-389-8852           685 Emory Valley Rd (B)  |
|   Fax:  865-425-0978           Oak Ridge, TN 37830      |
-----------------------------------------------------------




More information about the Beowulf mailing list