12.2 Recommended PSE System Characteristics

Digital recommends setting the following system characteristics to create a single system image:

Configuration information should be consistent across all PSE cluster members. In particular:
- Consistent user access - Users have the same user name, password, user ID (UID), and group ID (GID) on all PSE cluster members. This means that the information found in the following files should be consistent across all PSE cluster members:
  passwd
  group
- System Data - The consistency of the following files is critical to produce the single system image:
  hosts
  networks
  services
  resolv.conf
  svc.conf
  exports
  fstab
  automount maps
Digital recommends that you use a combination of the Network Information Service (NIS) and Domain Name System (DNS) facilities to distribute this information to all PSE cluster members. For more information, see the Digital UNIX netword configuration manual.
File systems that are used by the system, a PSE user, or an application executing in the PSE environment must be accessible to all PSE cluster members.
Digital recommends that you use the Network File System (NFS) and automount facilities to manage access to all shared filesystems.
Similar /tmp size.
Similar swap space size.
Same or similar kernel configuration parameters, such as:
dfldsiz
maxdsiz
dflssiz
maxssiz
maxusers
Consistent time - Cluster system time should be synchronized to ensure coordinated execution of distributed processes. Digital recommends that you use the Network Time Protocol (NTP) to provide time synchronization.