Linux NFS server

[pll at lanminds.com]

In a message dated: Wed, 06 Nov 2002 11:25:07 EST
"Andrew W. Gaunt" said:

>The reason I asked this general question is to find
>anecodotal evidence or even actual facts that can help
>us increase/decrease our comfort level with replacing
>a very expensive NAS solution ($100K/yr).

For some reason this conversation seems familiar :)
Hmmm, expensive NAS solution.  Wonder whose that could be?!

>We believe replacing it with linux based box is something that
>can be do this and be a lot cheaper.

You can definitely do it cheaper than $100K/year!

>We have a little money, but, not $100K. We do need to show that the
>replacement can be expected to work reasonably well
>as far as performance and availabilty and that maintenance
>is something we can do on our own without wizards and
>magic potions.

Well, I don't know what kind of wizards and/or magic potions your 
current solution requires, but at least with an open Linux solution, you 
have a much wider field of wizards to choose from!

>Anyway, I often hear rumblings about the mixing of
>the NFS's, Solaris and linux not playing well in certain
>situations. I'd like to determine if these rumblings
>are based on old fears, configuration issues or whatever.

The real problem with Linux and Solaris not playing well together wrt 
to NFS/NIS has more to do with the way Linux implemented NFS/NIS and 
the automounter.

For example, Linux's implementation of NIS does not support direct 
maps for the automounter, which is something Solaris *does* support.
If you don't need direct maps, then it won't matter much to you.

Additionally, Solaris has slightly better support for NFSv3 than 
Linux does (for now).  But if you specify to only use NFSv2, on both 
server and client, you'll be fine (though I believe I recently heard 
that Linux's NFSv3 support is fixed and now works fine).

NIS used to be the big problem.  NIS is a mess to begin with, 
regardless of whose implementation it is.  For some reason Linux NIS 
masters and slave servers were problematic when trying to bind to 
them from Sun clients.  Of course, my experience with that was 3+ years
ago, and has probably been fixed since then.

>So far the reasons I usually come up with are things
>like "SUN invented NFS, use SUN" or something equally
>uninformative..

Not only is that uninformative, but completely irrellevant!  Of the 
"Big Three" UNIX Vendors (Sun, HP, DEC), DEC's True64 supposedly has 
the best NFS/NIS implementations and had full support for NFSv3 long 
before Sun!

Sun has typically been slightly ahead of HP with their 
implementations, though HP I think caught up in HP-UX 11 when they 
finally added nsswitch.conf support for more than passwd resolution :)

Sun may have invented it, but overall, they've been slow to catch up 
with the standards.

Linux should do fine as an NFS server for 100 clients.

At mcl, we did see some performance problems, but they were kernel 
related, and AFAIK have since been fixed.  You should have very 
little trouble meeting the performance of Sun system doing the same 
job.
-- 

Seeya,
Paul
--
	It may look like I'm just sitting here doing nothing,
   but I'm really actively waiting for all my problems to go away.

	 If you're not having fun, you're not doing it right!