Gerhard den Hollander
A variety of linux clients (suse 7.2 /7.3 mainly, one or two redhat boxes and a laptop with 8.1) solaris clients and a couple of SGI boxes.
Never had performance problems, but you have to tune the nfs server.
Could you try NFS server$ dd if=/dev/zero of=/home/user/10MiBfile bs=10240k count=1 NFS server$ touch /home/user/10MiBfile # before each client access NFS client$ time cat /home/user/10MiBfile > /dev/null on the 7.3 and 8.1 clients? In my case the transfer speed is 1.3 MiB/s for 7.3 and around 500 KiB/s on 8.1 (100 Mbps network). With a SuSE-7.2 client and SuSE-7.3 server the transfer speed is 11.1 MiB/s which is quite good.
But NIS is perfectly suited for maintaining a central user database.
IMHO NIS is obsolete but I don't have time to discuss it in details now.
I'm not thinking about managing 20 Unix boxes by highly skilled professionals with PhD in computer science. I'm thinking about managing thousands of Linux desktops by IT people who are (1) not very skilled and (2) not interested in searching for new solutions.
Forget it. If you have to manage thousands of dekstops, you have to spend the money to hire 1 good professional.
Good professionals are needed for new concepts, security, ... and they already work in IT departments of big companies. But these people don't replace failed hardware in remote locations, don't do new installations according to a pattern, don't install and configure user applications, don't provide user support, .... Lower paid technicians and people of similar expertise level do the routine work. What I'm trying to say is that there is a lack of "enterprise level" Linux administration tools for the later people. But, apparently, I can't do it a way that people understand. -- Alexandr.Malusek@imv.liu.se