NIS client hangs on reboot

[Mark Ellzey]

I have a c200 NIS client that hangs during a reboot. The system will execute all the startup scripts until it gets to "Starting NIS client subsystem", then just hangs, displaying 'wait'. No keyboard response, no Ctrl-C, no Ctrl-\, nothing. The only thing I can do is power off and power on. Of course, this leads to fsck. After fsck, the system will boot completely.

There is one error during the second reboot, that of "NIS server not responding, retrying" at the NIS client startup. It displays this message a couple of times, then apparantly finds the NIS server and continues with the boot. Once the boot is complete, everything is fine.

Has anyone else ever seen this behavior? Both NIS master and client are version 10.20. I must be missing something...

[A. Clay Stephenson]

I'm guessing that you probably don't have a functional NIS server (master or slave) on this subnet.

In any event, you want this box to come up even if the server is not available. In /etc/rc.config.d/namesvrs set WAIT_FOR_NIS_SERVERS=FALSE and MAX_NISCHECKS=2. After 2 timeouts the boot process will continue if the NIS server cannot be found.

[Mark Ellzey]

Clay,

I do have a NIS server on this subnet. I have about 20 clients for this domain, and this is the only one that exhibits that behavior. I'll put WAIT_FOR_NIS_SERVER=FALSE in the namesvrs file (it was blank) and see if it make any difference the next time we have to boot the machine.

Thanks,
Mark

[Yarema A. Mikhajliv]

Try to check network interfaces, I had the same problems with misconfiguration of network used by port-agregation. If you have that one - try leave just 1 patchcord plugged for every interface.

[Mark Ellzey]

Thread closed. Thanks for all replies.