NIS?

[Jakob Østergaard]

On Thu, Oct 04, 2001 at 05:58:25PM -0500, W Bauske wrote:
> Jakob Xstergaard wrote:
> > 
> > On Thu, Oct 04, 2001 at 12:54:20AM -0400, Greg Lindahl wrote:
> > > On Mon, Oct 01, 2001 at 07:07:32AM -0700, Bob Campbell wrote:
> > >
> > > > NIS or not?
> > > >
> > > > With a fairly large cluster with a fairly small
> > > > number of users, do most of you use NIS?
> > >
> > > Heck, no. files rock, NIS sucks.
> > 
> > Yeah,  and aerodynamics are for people who can't design engines.
> > 
> 
> Greg is correct. NIS has problems when you load the network and it
> starts trying to retransmit. Stick to mirroring files if you can
> or run NIS slave masters on all your nodes.

It was the "definitive" statement that I objected to.  Seeing "Greg is correct"
in your reply is a little amusing seen from my side  ;)

Sure, NIS will suck for some, many, or even the majority of installations that
it could be used in.

I just tried to hint that maybe, just maybe, there could be situations out
there where files do not rock, and NIS does not suck.

My installation has very few nodes compared to many of the clusters out there,
but I have HPUX, Solaris, FreeBSD, GNU/Linux, Win2k, and others on the way -
all working together (automated cross platform compilation etc.) - and NIS works
very well in that setup.

This is not the typical 1000 machine homogenous compute cluster, and I won't
try to defend the use of NIS on such installations for a picosecond.

> 
> I've seen it cause troubles at two customers and on my own systems.
> 

I am sure that you have.   And I'm sure that if it was not some other error,
then it was probably because NIS sucked for that kind of installation.

NIS rocks here.  Files suck, except those that are NFS exported from the NIS
master and slave nodes   :)

-- 
................................................................
:   jakob at unthought.net   : And I see the elder races,         :
:.........................: putrid forms of man                :
:   Jakob Østergaard      : See him rise and claim the earth,  :
:        OZ9ABN           : his downfall is at hand.           :
:.........................:............{Konkhra}...............: