"Brandon D. Valentine" wrote: > do intend to work on this. At the moment I sit daily in front of an SGI > Indigo2 running IRIX because it's better than Linux and integrates quite > well with our environment. I really want a FreeBSD workstation on my > desk, so I'll likely end up writing the patches just so I can get that > FreeBSD workstation integrated. But, no promises on a timeframe so if > someone else wants to get started now, then by all means charge right > ahead with it.
I'm not sure why you aren't using FreeBSD here. Myself, I sit in front of FreeBSD on an Athlon 1200 MHz box complete with dual head 19" monitors running XFree86 4.1.0 in xinerama mode so my X server is stretched across the two displays. This is good in that I can keep the NT world on one display (Windows Terminal Server via either Citrix ICA, rdesktop RDP or X11 but most will use RDP due to cheaper licencing) and I can even switch one of my monitors to its BNC input to use my aging Sparc 10 (which I dont do anymore since its hard disk died). I am a NIS client but most of the users who use my machine have local home directories but I am not averse to having /home/user being a sym link to /net/expensive-server/export/home/user because I do run amd solely to provide /net automounting. I get backed up by HP OpenView OmniBack (as discussed elsewhere on FreeBSD lists). I even run the Matrox drivers for my G400 dual head card. The main thing that's bugging me right now is the NIS client performance but it appears that no-one on these lists runs a FreeBSD NIS client (or they do but dont stress their network). I see that overnight when there is lots of network traffic due to backups that my periodically run jobs fail to run because NIS cant get stuff from the server. The NIS server does coordinate a lot of the backups and is probably under network load itself at the time. Most people will say something along the lines of "crummy network", "crummy NIS server" or something like that to which I'd have to say "Why dont other people on my network have this problem ?". Yes these other people are NIS clients. I can see this poor performance in just trying to start an xterm under network load and can create 24 -> 32 second delays with a test as follows: % cd /usr/ports/distfiles/xc % ftp nis-server (my home there is local to that box) ftp> prompt ftp> mput *.tgz Just after pressing enter on the above line, start two xterms. Now thats quite a bit of data even when myself and the server are on 100Mbit/s full-duplex switched ethernet links. -rw-r----- 1 user group 237098 Oct 3 17:55 X336contrib.tgz -rw-r----- 1 user group 17388037 Oct 3 17:55 X336src-1.tgz -rw-r----- 1 user group 14834083 Oct 3 17:55 X336src-2.tgz -rw-r----- 1 user group 21994230 Oct 3 17:55 X401src-1.tgz -rw-r----- 1 user group 18971060 Oct 3 17:55 X401src-2.tgz -rw-r----- 1 user group 23880758 Oct 3 17:56 X402src-1.tgz -rw-r----- 1 user group 18918369 Oct 3 17:56 X402src-2.tgz -rw-r----- 1 user group 24990773 Oct 3 17:56 X410src-1.tgz -rw-r----- 1 user group 22496001 Oct 3 17:56 X410src-2.tgz The transfers go well with the larger files achieving between 5.14 and 7.78 MB/s however the xterms dont appear until after the whole FTP mput is finished. i.e. the timing was: T+0 I press enter on the "mput *.tgz" FTP command T+3s I launch xterm 1 from another xterm T+5s I launch xterm 2 from another xterm T+25s FTP mput completes T+27s xterm 1 appears on my display T+37s xterm 2 appears on my display Now xterm 1 has the message "yp_first: clnt_call: RPC: Timed out" as its first line and xterm 2 has two of these messages. So I'd like to do a little bit of investigation and was wonderring if other people have some insight as to where to look. This is not a short term problem and has been present across many months of -CURRENT (last build 19th September 2001 and typically built monthly) ever since I became a NIS client about 18 to 24 months ago. Further info: The nis-server runs HP-UX 10.20. The network is expensive Cisco switched ethernet with everything tied down to 100 MBit full-duplex at all ends except my FreeBSD box which is autonegotiating its "3Com 3c905B-TX Fast Etherlink XL" card simply because I have the line ifconfig_xl0="DHCP" in my /etc/rc.conf and I dont know how to set media options with ifconfig when DHCPing (anyone ??). -- Matthew Thyer Phone: +61 8 8259 7249 Science Corporate Information Systems Fax: +61 8 8259 5537 Defence Science and Technology Organisation, Edinburgh PO Box 1500 Edinburgh South Australia 5111 IMPORTANT: This email remains the property of the Australian Defence Organisation and is subject to the jurisdiction of section 70 of the CRIMES ACT 1914. If you have received this email in error, you are requested to contact the sender and delete the email. To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message
