Very Computer

I am investigating ways to improve my network performance of my network.
I have a SS1000 with 4 CPUs, 128 MB RAM, and a SPARC Storage Array with
30 GB of disk space as my server. The server is mainly an NFS server not
a CPU server. I have 5 SPARC 20s, 15 SPARC 5's and 10 other various Sun
workstations that access the server. The server is also my NIS+ root master
server. I have most of my workstations setup as dataless clients which
makes it easier to install and administer. However this causes a lot of
network traffic. I am not currently running the automounter or CacheFS or
AutoClient. These are some items I am considering. I also plan on adding
a FastEthernet interface to the server. Here are some questions that I
am interested in hearing comments on:

1. What is the max number of diskless and dataless clients that a server
that I described should be expected to handle? I have 4 diskless clients
that I am contemplating order disks for. These clients are old - IPCs and
SLCs.

2. How good does CacheFS work alone (w/o AutoFS)? How safe is it?

3. How good does CacheFS work with AutoFS?

4. How does Soltice AutoClient work?

All the SPARC 5s and 20s have either 535 MB or 1 GB disks which I am
only currently using 300 MB of for local root and swap.

Any and all comments are welcome and appreciated. You may either e-mail
or post or both. I will post a summary report on all the replies.

Thanks,

-Don

--
Don Turrentine, Information Systems Specialist
UAB - Cardiac Rhythm Management Laboratory
Volker Hall G78A
1670 University Blvd
Birmingham, AL 35294-0019
205-975-4710 Voice
205-975-4720 Fax

We've had our problems running cachefs over automounted filesystems
(Solaris 2.4, the usual patches).

Scenario: rlogin to server, no response, eventually rlogin times out.
(It's a bit painful to debug this problem, since you can't log in.)

Probable explanation: the login directory triggers the automounter,
which in turn triggers cachefs, which for some reason decides to run
fsck on the cache before it lets the mount succeed!  Needless to say,
if your cache has a nontrivial size you're in for a long wait....

Turning off cachefs fixes the problem.  Wish I had a better workaround.