NFS Server Comments

[Tim Buller <buller@math.ukans.edu>]

We are investigating the possibility of replacing a departmental NFS
Server which is currently a Sun Sparc 20 running Solaris with some kind of
i386 hardware running Debian 2.1. This server would support about 500
users, 100 of which may be active in any one week. It would have ~50 GB of
RAID5 storage. It would also run Samba and Netatalk to serve user files to
Windoze and Mac boxes. Some questions/issues are:

1) The NFS server support is better in 2.2.x. Is it better "enough" to
implement in a production system? Are people doing this?

2) Work on the kernel-space NFS server seems to be moving along, albeit a
bit slowly. Anyone have any comments about the performance of the
user-space vs. the kernel-space NFS server programs?

3) I have been relatively happy with the performance of a Debian/i386
system as a NFS server for a few home directories, shared filesystems,
etc. How does the NFS subsystem scale at this time?

4) What are the biggest hardware constraints on system like this? I am
investigating hardware RAID controllers. If the IO performance is
maximized through hardware RAID, are these file serving processes
(NFS/Samba/Netatalk) going to tend to be bound by CPU or memory
performance?

5) What about coda? Is it stable enough to implement in a production
system at the departmental level?

Thanks for any and all input...

	Tim

====
Tim Buller                                       buller@math.ukans.edu
Systems Specialist                               Office: Snow Hall 643
Department of Mathematics                          Voice: 785-864-7311
University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS 66045             Fax: 785-864-5255

#!/bin/perl -sp0777i<X+d*lMLa^*lN%0]dsXx++lMlN/dsM0<j]dsj
$/=unpack('H*',$_);$_=`echo 16dio\U$k"SK$/SM$n\EsN0p[lN*1
lK[d2%Sa2/d0$^Ixp"|dc`;s/\W//g;$_=pack('H*',/((..)*)$/)

Please visit http://online.offshore.com.ai/arms-trafficker/