What a lot of answers to this question ! Looks like a LOT of people are
running NIS.
I cannot name everyone because there were too many answers, but you know
who you are and I thank each an everyone of you.
The orginal question was posted in order to determine if it was possible to
use NIS in a network composed of various UNIX boxes from different vendors,
Different UNIX varieties and/or versions. That is, is NIS compatible
accross different platforms.
Most answered that there was no problem if you run PLAIN NIS (Not NIS+) but
you have to be careful to:
a) Not use C2 security (There is no standard in that area)
b) Remember to provide an NIS slave in each subnet in case the master
crashes
c) Do not use proprietary stuff that deals with password feature. For
example, someone suggested that HP has some kind of password aging
mechanism that can wreak havoc with NIS.
d) Try to put the master(s) and slave(s) on the same kind of machines and
OS.
e) Beware of long lines in the netgroup file if you use netgroups.
(and beware of long resultant lines after recursive expansion of
netgroups).
The ypmake script(s) may have to be slightly patched to minimize
difficulties with long lines if there are lots of accounts or machines.
f) Beware of users who are in too many groups in the /etc/group file
since some kinds of systems only allow 8 group memberships for a single
user. This frequently happens with the root account.
g) Yes, the only catch is if any of the SUNS are still Running SUNos, a Sun
will have to be the yp server. Solaris has the nsswitch file that works
similarly to svc.conf on the Alphas, but SUNos expects standard name
service(dns) lookups to be done by the yp server and returned as yp
answers.
Some people told me that I could run into problems, but considering that
99% of people told me there were no problems, we can assume that there is
no problem as long as you stick to very basic functionnality accross all
platforms.
Thanks again !
--------------------------------------------------------
Guy E Dallaire, Unix SysAdmin, DBA
Le Directeur General des Elections du Quebec, QC, Canada
Phone: (418) 646-8618
Fax: (418) 644-9624
** "Honni soit qui disco pense"
Received on Thu Jun 19 1997 - 05:15:49 NZST