Netgear FA311TX

Greg Lindahl lindahl at keyresearch.com
Mon May 20 12:35:51 PDT 2002


On Mon, May 20, 2002 at 02:49:09PM -0400, Gabriel J. Weinstock wrote:

>   Finally, a theoretical question. We have 4 gigabit Ethernet cards
> and a 4-port gigabit switch (Asante FriendlyNet GX4.) Would I be
> correct in assuming we could boost performance by connecting a head
> node to 3 slave nodes w/ the gigabit hardware, and then making the 3
> slave nodes NIS slave servers to the head, and serving the remainder
> of the cluster [which uses fast Ethernet] its NIS maps from the 4
> NIS servers, in a distributed fashion?

If you *really* want to use NIS on your cluster, you should make every
system in the cluster a slave server. Most people just use files. Either
way you can be pretty much assured that you won't see much slowdown.

In most clusters, people are worried about things like MPI or NFS
traffic, not NIS traffic.

greg




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