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Date:      Tue, 11 Jul 2000 11:27:36 -0400 (EDT)
From:      "Brandon D. Valentine" <bandix@looksharp.net>
To:        freebsd-questions@freebsd.org
Subject:   NIS/YP compatibility
Message-ID:  <Pine.BSF.4.21.0007111105440.3232-100000@turtle.looksharp.net>

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[A -questions matter.  BCC'd to -stable to gain the input of the many on
that list who run FreeBSD in an enterprise situation.  Please, if you
reply on -questions CC me as I have trouble sifting through all of my
-questions mailbox]

I'm running into some NIS/YP issues which I would like the community's
input on.  To make a long story short we need our users to be machine
independent.  We run such a motley collection of OSes on the hardware we
have around here that NIS/YP is the lowest common denominator solution
for user account management.  It's the only scheme every platform we run
has support for.  Security issues aside, I must run NIS.  At the moment
we are successfully running NIS + NFS(w/ automounted shares) off of an
IRIX box.  This was installed and running when I arrived.  That IRIX box
is somebody's workstation and understandably I'd like to move that
service onto one of our servers around here.  Downtime is a Bad
Thing<tm> and workstations have downtime.  When I got here there were
already servers running RedHat Linux doing various things.  My first
thought was to try moving NIS onto the Linux servers, they were already
running and NIS doesn't impact server performance significantly.  Well,
no such luck, Linux's yp and NFS implementations are for shame!  The
only things that would talk to the Linux boxen were other Linux boxen.
Soon after that failed attempt I inherited a couple of old
sparcstation's for server use that I figured would make decent NIS
servers since they're 10BaseT only and I wouldn't want to use them to
serve anything bandwidth intensive anyway.  I opted to install
NetBSD/sparc on them after inspecting the OpenBSD and NetBSD manpages on
yp and concluding that NetBSD had a more recent, complete
implementation.  That endeavor failed too.  The Linux boxen and other
sparc's running NetBSD could talk to it just fine, but the IRIX clients
were no go.  Now I'm understandably a bit frustrated.  All this time
I've also been struggling with the fact that I'm a BSD admin, those
things are natural to me, and the various SYSV OSes we have running
around are giving me nightmares the night after I dig around in /etc.  I
would love to be able to put my favorite OS, FreeBSD, on these servers
and be done with it.  Give linux the axe, so to speak.  In fact, I've
even convinced my boss to let me do it if it'll get these NIS issues
resolved.  He too, doesn't desire to leave NIS running off of an IRIX
workstation any longer than he has to.  Here's the dilemma, with all of
the issues we've had surrounding various NIS implementations, before I
set about the task of converting our servers to FreeBSD, he would like
to see some detailed success reports from people using FreeBSD to serve
IRIX NIS/YP clients.  Details like what version of FreeBSD, what version
of IRIX, and what is used as master, slave, and client.  I've searched
the mailing list archives to no avail.  I am asking those of you
listening to help me out and jot down a quick message about your use of
NIS in a mixed IRIX/FreeBSD environment.  Thank you for your time.

-- 
Brandon D. Valentine, Systems Administrator
Vanderbilt University, Center for Structural Biology
bandix at looksharp.net  |  bandix at structbio.vanderbilt.edu
"Truth suffers from too much analysis." -- Ancient Fremen Saying



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