Re: NIS exhausts system resources

Dan Pelleg wrote:
> When does this happen, you ask? I triggered it this morning by booting the
> machine when the NIS server was down. I had also seen it in the past when
> configuring NIS, and it happened as soon as I set the domainname.  Any
> ideas? I can provide packet captures on request, however note the failure
> where the server is down.

Historical behaviour when the NIS server is down has been for the
client machines to hang until the NIS server is back up.

FreeBSD doesn't serialize NIS requests trough a single local daemon,
so it doesn't hang "like it's supposed to".

It's probably that you could reorder the source code to ensure that
no file opens (other than sockets) are held across an NIS request;
this would certainly reduce pressure on the number of open files.

Note that since you are SSH'ing in, and have other processes running,
most likely, you just need to increase "MAXUSERS" to increase the
maximum number of open files, and let them hang simultaneously,
instead of running out of descriptors.

In general, NIS servers are not supposed to go down, ever.

-- Terry