Server Disk Space Requirements

How much disk space you need depends on four factors:

• Disk space consumed by the Solaris operating environment

• Disk space for /var/nis (and /var/yp if using NIS compatibility)

• Amount of server memory

• Swap space required for NIS+ server processes

The Solaris operating environment can require over 220 Mbytes of disk space, depending on how much of it you install. For exact numbers, see your Solaris installation guides. You should also count the disk space consumed by other software the server might use. The NIS+ software itself is part of the Solaris 2.6 distribution, so it does not consume additional disk space.

NIS+ directories, groups, tables, and client information are stored in /var/nis. The /var/nis directory uses about 5 Kbytes of disk space per client. For example purposes only, if a namespace has 1000 clients, /var/nis requires about 5 Mbytes of disk space. However, because transaction logs (also kept in /var/nis) can grow large, you may want additional space per client--an additional 10-15 Mbytes is recommended. In other words, for 1000 clients, allocate 15 to 20 Mbytes for /var/nis. You can reduce this if you checkpoint transaction logs regularly. You should also create a separate partition for /var/nis. This separate partition will help during an operating system upgrade.

If you will use NIS+ concurrently with NIS, allocate space equal to the amount you are allocating to /var/nis for /var/yp to hold the NIS maps that you transfer from NIS.

You also need swap space equal to twice the size of rpc.nisd--in addition to the server's normal swap space requirements. To see the amount of memory being used by rpc.nisd on your system, run the nisstat command. See the rpc.nisd man page for more information. Most of this space is used during callback operations or when directories are checkpointed (with nisping -C) or replicated, because during such procedures, an entire NIS+ server process is forked. In no case should you use less than 64 Mbytes of swap space.