very chatty clients sent 28June2002

[Scott Croft]

I had responded to Tom directly with a question as to whether they were
running compat mode on the NIS+ server. His response back was yes.
Running in compat mode tends to put a lot more traffic over the network.
As you stated, running nscd also helps, but there is a drawback to that
as when you have issues with authentication and possible cache data
corruption.

We have A LOT of clients running on our network, AIX, Solaris and Linux
with very little chatter except when needed. I ran snoop on the master
for over an hour and specifically tracked a linux NIS+ system that is
hit very heavily by end users. I had little to no traffic on the master.
On the replica that I know it would hit, there was increased traffic
compared to the master, but no more than the Solaris hosts. We are
running Rh 7.2 with the latest patches and not in compat mode, nor is
compat set on the RH system as some of the documentation suggests.

Scott

On Wed, 2002-10-30 at 16:52, Robert Edwards wrote:
> 
> I think that, on the whole, the Linux nisplus code is a little "chattier" than 
> the Solaris implementation.
> 
> I have just performed a couple of simple tests (using tcpdump) on some Linux 
> nisplus clients, both with the Name Server Cache Daemon (nscd) running and 
> without. nscd seems to make a little bit of an improvement for, eg., "ls -l" 
> where the UID/GID needs to be looked up from the nisplus maps.
> 
> Just logging into a RH8.0 client as a normal user with home directory mounted 
> from another NFS server (not the NIS+ server) and with nscd running, resulted 
> in 659 packets to and from the NIS+ server. Subsequenty doing an "ls -l" 
> resulted in only another 32 packets.
> 
> Note that our NIS+ server is only a NIS+ server - it doesn't really do 
> anything else (it is a Sun Netra X1 running Solaris 8) - so although there is 
> a relatively large number of NIS+ packets flowing to and from it - this 
> doesn't seems to affect the performance of our network at all.
> 
> We have about 43 Linux and 2 Solaris nisplus clients in our network.
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> Bob Edwards.
> 
> On Thu, 31 Oct 2002 02:52 am, Tom Wike wrote:
> > HI,
> > I could not find any response to this email, we are seeing the same
> > thing and we only have 15 (out of over 200) RedHat 7.2 boxes running as
> > NIS+ clients, this additional traffic is a real concern for us - can
> > anyone comment or tell me your experiences with many Linux NIS+ clients
> > using Solaris NIS+ masters? Thanks!
> >
> > -Tom
> >
> > Marc Wrubleski wrote:
> > >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