Date: Sun, 7 Jul 2002 19:41:59 +0100 From: Matthew Seaman <m.seaman@infracaninophile.co.uk> To: Tim Kellers <timothyk@serv1.wallnet.com> Cc: questions@FreeBSD.ORG, kellers@njit.edu Subject: Re: NFS/NIS... arg! Message-ID: <20020707184159.GA22493@happy-idiot-talk.infracaninophi> In-Reply-To: <20020706235347.Y14336-100000@serv1.wallnet.com> References: <20020706235347.Y14336-100000@serv1.wallnet.com>
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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
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