NIS master server upgrade

[Helen French]

Hi all,

I am planning to upgrade the OS (cold install) of one of my NIS master server from 10.20 to 11.0. There is no NIS slave servers, but with clients. Please advice about the best and easy way to do this. Also about the important things that I need to take care about !

Thanks in advance !
Shiju

[Francois Bariselle_3]

I had upgrade the OS of my NIS master server from 10.20 to 11.0 and I dont have problems.
After the upgrade, repush all maps.

Frank.

[A. Clay Stephenson]

Hi:

You have violated one of the most fundamental rules of NIS - always have slave servers. You don't indicate what functions NIS are doing for your clients but whatever they are (hostname resolution, passwd, group, automount maps, services, ...) they are down for the interim. If I were doing this, I wouuld first create an NIS slave server so that the clients can continue to function normally. You can then safely upgrade your NIS master. As for what you need to save, /etc/passwd, /etc/group, /etc/services, /etc/hosts, and the master versions of any other maps like automount maps. If you have modified your yp makefile then you need a copy of it as well.

After you finish your upgrade, you also need to enable a new slave server so that the failure of the master doesn't harm you.

[Sachin Patel]

I know you will have very good backup.
Make sure you have your make file. All the original map files. Is your new nis server going to be same name/IP? if not all slaves will be configure again.

Sachin

[Helen French]

Thanks to all.

Clay,

Thanks for the help. I know it's a violation about the salve server; but this is a test site and not a big network. The actual NIS functions include passwd, group, services and automount maps. I am aware about the down time, but they wouldn't mind it. My concern is about the best upgrade step( creating fresh/new maps from the ASCII files OR preserving the old map files OR any other methods ). Also about any changes needs to do in the clients.

Sachin,

I will be using the same IP and hostnames.

Thanks
Shiju

[S.K. Chan · Accepted solution]

If you did not add any additional maps on top of the existing(default) maps that NIS manages, then this should be a straight forward migration. These are the default files that are manage by NIS. If you look at /var/yp/ypmake file in your existing NIS master you should be able to figure 'em out.
/etc/mail/aliases
/etc/auto_master
/etc/group
/etc/hosts
/etc/netgroup
/etc/netid
/etc/networks
/etc/passwd
/etc/protocols
/etc/publickey
/etc/rpc
/etc/services
/etc/vhe_list
/etc/ethers
/etc/netmasks
You need to determine yourself which files are currently managed by NIS and those are the ones you need to copy across to the 11.x system. Another thing to watch out for is /etc/rc.config.d/namesvrs. Any customized settings here needs to be used when you setup the new NIS master. So basically the process would look like ..
On server
---------
1) Edit /etc/rc.config.d/namesvrs.
2) Copy the "/etc/xxxx" files over.
3) Enable and start NIS master.
On clients
----------
1) Just restart nis.client will do.

[Helen French]

Thanks for the inputs !

Chan,

This is what I planned. So in the list you provided, the step 3) would be 'ypinit -m' and that will create the new maps on the server. Any other suggestions ?

Thanks
Shiju

[S.K. Chan]

Yes.. at step 3, it would be ..say your domain name is "engineer"

# domainname engineer
# ypinit -m
=> Build and install the NIS DB. It'll create the DB in /var/yp/engineer

Now start the NIS master or reboot the server.

[Steve Edmunds]

...and just to add again, it really is trivial
to create a slave server and requires zero
maintenance, so no matter how small your net is
there is no good reason not to have one. (even
with only two systems I'd make one a master, and one a slave)

Cheers

Steve