NIS and Automounter Problem

[Jim Hough_1]

We have recently converted the lab to a NIS configuration with Sun machines as the NIS Master and Slaves and a mixture of Sun and HP (HPUX 11.0) machines as the NIS Clients.

All seems to work well (so far) with one exception:

When logging onto the HP machines via the CDE as root, we see a problem when firing up the File Manager.

The File Manager seems to hang with "Reading..." in the status bar. In fact, the File Manager eventually recovers after about 40 mins and displays the filesystem. However, during this time users are unable to login via the CDE. Telnet sessions are OK, but NIS user home directories are not being auto-mounted.

If I try stopping and restarting nfs.client, I am told "cannot unmount /net : device busy".

If it helps, my /etc/auto_master file reads:
/net -hosts -nosuid,soft
I have tried changing the "timeo" and "retry" parameters, but it had no (noticeable) effect.

Thanks in advance.

[Helen French]

Check the configuration for /etc/nsswitch.conf. I presume the user root, should be a local user on every system where the home directories would not be automounted. If so, then the configuration for /etc/nsswitch.conf should read :

passwd: files [NOTFOUND=continue]nis
group: files [NOTFOUND=continue]nis
hosts: nis [NOTFOUND=return] files
networks: nis [NOTFOUND=return] files
protocols: nis [NOTFOUND=return] files
rpc: nis [NOTFOUND=return] files
publickey: nis [NOTFOUND=return] files
netgroup: nis [NOTFOUND=return] files
automount: files nis
aliases: files nis
services: files nis

Also, double-check the automounter configuration for the master server:
# ypcat -k auto.master

which may or may not be the same as
/etc/auto_master

The nsswitch.conf entry would control

[Jim Hough_1]

Thanks Corey.

I should have mentioned that we have tried various automount entries in the nsswitch.conf with no apparent effect.


For info, we have temporarily circumvented the problem with:
chmod 000 /usr/dt/bin/dtfile

Crude, but effective...

[Shannon Petry]

For starters, I have never had any success with an auto_master setup as you have. Mine is usually read
/net /etc/auto.home
/other /etc/auto.other
/- /etc/auto.direct
Order is important.
my auto.home is a "+auto.home" and the ypcat -k auto.home will show
* server:/big-disk/&
or something to that effect.

Next problem is that HP-UX does not use NFS version 3 by default. edit the file /etc/rc.config.d/nfs and change the AUTO_FS=0 to AUTO_FS=1 to force version 3 on the client.

Simply making the HP-UX systems use NFSv3 calls may fix your problem.

Regards,
Shannon