Re: [SAGE] NIS conniption fits - update

[John Rowan Littell <littejo@earlham.edu>]

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Status update:  Yesterday I did as Julian suggested and put all the
information for all the cluster hosts in all of the systems'
/etc/hosts file.  However, it just now happened again.  On the third
hand, I was re-reading a bit of Managing NFS and NIS, and came across
the rpcinfo -b command, which reminded me that I had yet another
system in the NIS cluster: a most annoying Snap! server which was
responding to the broadcast queries.  Rather than adding it to the
hosts file as well, I simply shut it down (it's little used and on its
last legs).  It could very well have a number of "interesting"
features about it, ranging from not-well synchronized clock (the rest
of the systems all peer to the same NTP sources), decidedly
non-standard NIS implementation, practically no security worth
mentioning ... the list goes on.  I'll try running without that for a
while and see if the problem goes away.

This time (as I have sometimes in the past) I captured around 50 MB of
NIS traffic between two systems over the span of a minute or so.  I'd
be interested if anyone has pointers to analysis tools specifically
for NIS data.  Ethereal is nice, but it's taken 15 minutes to load 3/4
of the data, and it's still a pretty blunt instrument for telling me
what kind of stuff is happening.  What it does tell me is that most of
the traffic is ypserv v2 NEXT calls and replies on the group.byname
map.

I checked on all the cluster members (FreeBSD and Solaris) this time,
and the Solaris ones were just as affected as far as not being able to
do something like 'finger user'.  Other interesting fact: 'ypcat
mapname' continues to work as long as the domain is bound, even if
'finger user' hangs.  The domain remains bound for most of the problem
period, although sometimes ypwhich comes back as not bound.

  --rowan

- -- 
John "Rowan" Littell
Systems Administrator
Earlham College Computing Services
http://www.earlham.edu/~littejo/
2004-01-22 10:34
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