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Re: "NFS Slave"??



> 
> > a. Why are you using NIS on a beowulf cluster?
> 
> To distribute user login information to the nodes. If fact, to distribute
> host IP information too, since we do not set up DNS within the private
> net. You can distribute NIS netgroup information too, and use that to
> reserve part of a cluster to a certain group of users, if you must.

Have you come across a true need for the use of NIS netgroups?

- Login information can be pushed out and synchronzied to nodes
	= Rsync, Scp.
- Nodes in the cluster shouldn't be accessing outside world information
	= Static hosts file should be fine

In my experience, NIS traffic and NIS setup in general doesn't add 
enough benefit to the cluster. It does add internal network traffic and
slows down many network oriented library calls.

As a matter of fact, talking to Donald Becker, and looking at Scyld
they don't use NIS for anything (due to exactly the above outlined resasons).

I'm not sure what OSCAR does in this case... would anyone like to comment?

> > b. Can you export an NFS mounted file system?
> You can do that if you use the old userspace server, it can act as a NFS
> repeater. Not recommended, though, since it has some broken features and
> is less efficient. You cannot do that using the new in-kernel NFS server,
> which you should use since it is mode efficient, robust and reliable.

Excellent :) Okay, we are on the same page. knfsd is one way to go 
for performance on linux (and even then you need to tune it).

Would a solution be:
	- Add multiple NIC's to the NFS server.
	- Plug it into both networks.

c.


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