Integration of NIS and NFS

Hi,

we have to setup a NFS and NIS in our company ,
we have engineering group located on its own subnet ( 40 sparc based system running solaris8 ) and the Sales group located on its own subnet( 30 sparc based system running solaris8 ). We have to locate both the NIS and NFS Server in Engineering subnet.

can you suggest me what all configuration steps to carry out .

please send me any better resourses where i can find integrations in details.

Thanks in Anticipation
Far

Guide for SUN NIS
Solaris Naming Setup/Configuration Guide (docs.sun.com)

Hi Far,
If both subnets are connected with a router/gateway it does not matter where NFS is located. You should be able to mount across the router because it is using directed IP packets.
NIS is a different story. You will need to have a presence on each subnet. NIS uses broadcasts to locate the server intially. You can either multi-home your NIS server or create a slave or multiple slave servers on each subnet. Since you have multiple servers in each subnet I suggest you pick a few from each subnet to be a slave. You could even make all of them slaves but that may be overkill.
Hope that helps,
Tony

It is NIS (aka yp) or NIS+?

I haven't used NIS in a long time, but do not remember it supporting a master/slave configuration. NIS+ definately does.

To make homes automount in NIS+, all you have to do is populate the auto_home table with a key of the username, and the value of the NFS path (hostname:/path/to/home). In nsswitch.conf have it look to nis for automount, and set the home in the passwd table to /home/username.

You can even use this for non NIS+ users (passwd/shadow users) by putting the entry in auto_home, and a /home/username password entry. This assumes you are not running secure NFS/RPC. This should also work for 2 seperate NIS domains sharing one NFS server.

first off ... make sure it is NIS+ and not NIS ...

that said ...

i actually have been able to push NIS+ and NFS across different subnets (i.e., NIS+ server in Boston with NIS+ clients in Toronto) without any slaves or replicas so really the only thing that would stop you from setting both NFS and NIS+ servers in the Engineering subnet is a configuration issue ...

if both subnets go through the same router/switch devices --- there is no need for a NIS+ replica in the sales subnet unless you are measuring a miniscule performance hit that is really bothering the sales folks ... otherwise it is recommended that there also be a NIS+ replica on the remote subnet to enhance performance ... especially true if there is a sizable user base that read/write a lot of files on the hosts ... however my experience says that the remote NIS+ replica is really optional unless there is a "noticeable" performance difference between both subnets ....