>> Or is there a 32K+ limit on NIS user ids as well?
>
>ofcourse there is. NIS is just a way to manage your /etc/passwd centrally (no, don't
>start flaming now :)
Somewhere within the Sun NIS+ doco it talks about optimal sizes of around
10K objects. I've never been able to confirm what sort of degradation
happens when you exceed that number by over an order of magnitude. I don't
know whether this limitation applies to independent implementations (of
which there is one I know of).
The "large server" syndrome has been discussed on this list a number of
times and the archives will show that you really only have two readily
available solutions.
One is to use one heck of a mother NFS server (a NetAPP or similar) and a
fleet of front-end boxes that handle POP via layer 4 switching (eg Cisco
Local Director or similar).
The other is to allocate people on different physical servers - this is a lot
cheaper, but suffers from failure modes and administrative pains.
Regards.
