Managing Systems and Workgroups: A Guide for HP-UX System Administrators

Setting Up and Administering an HP-UX NFS Diskless Cluster
NFS Diskless Questions and Answers
Chapter 10938
Use the exportfs command to see what is currently exported, or look at
the /etc/exports file directly. If there is an error in the file, nothing
may be exported.
Question: How can I tell what kind of boot ROM my system has?
Answer: You shouldn’t need to know because both bootp and rbootd services are
started on cluster servers. But, in general, any SPU model introduced in
1994 or later (starting with the 9000/712) has new (BOOTP) boot ROMs.
Performance
Question: How can I improve performance in my cluster?
Answer: There are several things that you can do to get better performance. Here
are a few:
1. Use a local swap disk on each client.
2. Change the private root export to an asynchronous export.
If your clients swap to /paging in the private root, changing the
private root export to an asynchronous export will considerably
improve paging performance, but at a cost. If the server crashes
before a page from the client is committed to disk, one of the
following may occur when the server comes back up:
• The process could crash when it pages back in.
• The process could cause silent data corruption.
You can change to an asynchronous export by editing the
/etc/exports file on the server and adding the async option to each
private root export (/export/private_roots/ client ).
The following is an example of an entry in /etc/exports for an
asynchronous private root export for a client named zorro:
/export/private_roots/zorro -async,root=zorro,access=zorro
3. Use multiple LAN cards on your server to spread the cluster over
multiple networks.
4. Use FDDI on your server with an ethernet switch serving the 802.3
networks that the clients are connected to.