Re: Simple NIS question

From: Richard B. Gilbert (rgilbert88_at_comcast.net)
Date: 06/29/05 

Date: Wed, 29 Jun 2005 12:33:22 -0400

Jonathan Joseph wrote:

>
> Help.
>
> I have 3 sun boxes running solaris 8 and I have set one up as an NIS
> server. The other two are clients. The way it is now, if the server
> goes down, the clients become unusable. I could see that if you tried
> to boot a client machine without the NIS server available that it
> wouldn't be able to get the shared information, but I thought that
> after a while, it should stop waiting for the NIS server and at least
> boot into a configuration where you could log in as root.
>
> As it is now, client machines won't boot all the way up if the server
> is down, and if they were up and functioning happily when the server
> goes down, they will hang and become unusable. I thought that they
> should function happily, since all the info that the server has should
> have been pushed to them, you just wouldn't be abe to do things like
> change your password.
>
> Below is what my nsswitch.conf looks like on the client. On the
> server, it looks exactly the same except that the "hosts" line has
> "dns" appended to the end of it.
>
> So I have something set up wrong or is this the expected behavior?
>
> Thanks.
>
> -Jonathan
>
> #
> # /etc/nsswitch.nis:
> #
> # An example file that could be copied over to /etc/nsswitch.conf; it
> # uses NIS (YP) in conjunction with files.
> #
> # "hosts:" and "services:" in this file are used only if the
> # /etc/netconfig file has a "-" for nametoaddr_libs of "inet" transports.
>
> # the following two lines obviate the "+" entry in /etc/passwd and
> /etc/group.
> passwd: files nis
> group: files nis
>
> # consult /etc "files" only if nis is down.
> hosts: nis [NOTFOUND=return] files
> ipnodes: files
> # Uncomment the following line and comment out the above to resolve
> # both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses from the ipnodes databases. Note that
> # IPv4 addresses are searched in all of the ipnodes databases before
> # searching the hosts databases. Before turning this option on, consult
> # the Network Administration Guide for more details on using IPv6.
> #ipnodes: nis [NOTFOUND=return] files
>
> networks: nis [NOTFOUND=return] files
> protocols: nis [NOTFOUND=return] files
> rpc: nis [NOTFOUND=return] files
> ethers: nis [NOTFOUND=return] files
> netmasks: nis [NOTFOUND=return] files
> bootparams: nis [NOTFOUND=return] files
> publickey: nis [NOTFOUND=return] files
>
> netgroup: nis
>
> automount: files nis
> aliases: files nis
>
> # for efficient getservbyname() avoid nis
> services: files nis
> sendmailvars: files
> printers: user files nis
>
> auth_attr: files nis
> prof_attr: files nis
> project: files nis

The general solution is to add one or more slave servers to your
configuration and push (yppush) the files out to the slaves. Then
everybody is configured to look at the master and one or more slaves.
As long as you have at least one server, master or slave, up and running
the whole thing works.

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