very chatty clients

[Marc Wrubleski]

Hi all, I am new to this list, and I couldn't find what I was looking
for in the archives, so please forgive me if this has already been dealt
with somewhere.

For background, I have configured some Redhat 7.3 (kernels 2.4.18-3 and
also 2.4.18-5) systems as NIS+ clients using nis-utils-1.4.1

My question is, what would be considered a reasonable amount of traffic
for an idle system with someone logged in using NIS+? 

It seems that our Linux clients talk on the network to the NIS Server up
to 10 times as much as a Solaris client. In a couple of minutes I had
over 1000 packets related to tcp port 32772, NIS+, and portmap on my
system where the only activity is me writing this email. 

Is this normal? If not, what can I do to resolve this issue?

Thanks in advance.

Marc Wrubleski
Department of Mathematics and Statistics
University of Calgary