NIS design

[Penni Nussbaum]

I will be writing up a NIS design plan. It was mentioned to me that another area in my company has NIS set up so there are all slaves and no clients. This supposedly is better for the network as everone looks up on themself but there still is only one point of admin (the master). Are there any negatives to this plan?

[Patrick Wallek]

I don't know that having all servers as NIS slaves would save that much network traffic. There should not be much traffic between a NIS Client and the server it binds too. At least I wouldn't think that they would cause that much traffic.

The only drawback I could see is that when the server updates the YP maps, it could take a bit to update all the slaves, depending on how many you have.

The other thing to keep in mind with NIS on HP-UX is that if your machine is trusted, or is ever going to be trusted, then you can't use NIS. NIS and trusted systems don't mix.

NIS+ works with trusted systems (11.0 and up only), but that would involve a whole redesign of your current NIS environment and I doubt that you want to do that.

[Brian Hackley · Accepted solution]

Penni,
The answer to your question is "it depends".
If there will be a small number of NIS slave servers say 75 or under that is fine. However as soon as you scale beyond that the impact of making any changes will be significant. This is because the NIS Master pushes the entire map being updated to all the clients. If any NIS slaves are down or not reachable, this causes lengthy push times which are undesirable.
The typcial NIS recommendation per the HP "Installing and Administering NFS Services" manual from http://docs.hp.com and per the O'Reilly book "Managing NFS and NIS" is to have two slaves servers per IP subnet. This is allow for redundancy in case one of the slave servers goes down or is unavailable.
The amount of traffic NIS imposes on the network is relatively minor. The occasional host or password lookup on an NIS client takes fewer resources that a running ypserv process does for an NIS client.
I hope this helps you in your design decision,
Brian Hackley