[tech] Meito

[David Basden]

On Fri, Jul 11, 2003 at 01:22:32PM +0800, Grahame Bowland wrote:
> 
> Hi all,
> 
> I'd like to reinstall Meito with Linux rather than Solaris. The disk
> performance is hideously bad, which makes it fairly worthless as a
> fileserver. I suspect it just doesn't know how to talk to the IDE
> chipset at a reasonable speed.
> 
> As far as I can tell, meito has the following functions:
>   * samba PDC
>   * serving DNS
>   * NFS exporting various things
>   * file storage
> 
> Anyone see any major reason not to reinstall?

(Tell me if i'm wrong here. It's been a while and i'm going from memory).

NFS file serving under linux sucks, mainly because it isn't able to do
asyncronous writes.

NFS3 allows for the server to write to disk without an ack from the client
if specifically allowed on the connection. For some reason, Linux does not
support this in the server, so writes to a Linux NFS server are mind
bogglingly slow. The FAQ I read said this is unlikely to change.

This would be a big reason to stay away from Linux for NFS serving, and the
reason (from memory) it has been avoided in the past. If we didn't rely
as much on NFS, it wouldn't be so much of an issue, but the whole thing
is pretty much held together by NFS at the moment.

Again, it's been a while, so I could be totally wrong, or just out of date.

David