I fully agree. Having experience with administering Auspex servers as well as NetApps, as well as administering a large, complex NIS environment, it would be a pity to start adding more overhead to the NetApp outside of what it was originally intended for (i.e. fileservice). The Auspex was was a pain to manage because its lack of simplicity, and I didn't see the dedication to fileservice that NetApp provides.
As of 5.3.4 (?), NetApp provides the nis.servers option, where you can list all the possible NIS servers to bind to. This has worked quite well in our environment, esp. in the face of a failure of an NIS server the filer was bound to. Adding more overhead to the filer, such as NIS slave service, will only complexify the NetApp more, and as Jeff alluded to, bring it more into the Auspex realm (IMHO, this would only hurt NetApp). One of the features that makes the NetApp great to work with is its simplicity w.r.t. administration; if this isn't for you, then go with an Auspex or Sun (and buy enough Tylenol to boot).
--john
-----Original Message----- From: Jeff Innis [mailto:figaro911@hotmail.com] Sent: Tuesday, March 28, 2000 6:13 PM To: sirbruce@ix.netcom.com Cc: abond@netapp.com; demarest@arraycomm.com; toasters@mathworks.com Subject: Fwd: Re: NIS and netgroup file
Sure why not add NIS server, why stop there though lets add DNS too. Hey these things are so reliable, let's put a full blown kernel in there, and start running user apps as well. Anyone ever hear of a little box called Auspex??? I actually thought the concept of "dedicated" NFS appliance was a
good one.
Jeff
We are looking into ways of improving the NIS implementation to be more efficient. We are not planning on implementing the slave functionality
on
the filer though.
That's too bad, because it essentially makes a network less robust. See, if you rely on NIS files so you don't have to copy files to the filer locally, then lets say you have a power outage. The filer comes up and then can't do anything because it's waiting to talk to the NIS server (it's probably the DNS server too). The NIS server can't do anything because it's waiting to mount the filer. Stalemate. There are ways around this, like having your NIS/DNS server hold the data on a local disk, but then you have a kink in your whole centralized network storage scheme. Altenatively, you can copy everything to the filer, but then you've defeated the whole purpose of NIS.
Making filers slave servers is an ideal solution. You don't have to allow other clients to bind to them, but this way they can get data updated from a master and still have a local copy in the event of network problems.
Bruce
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