NIS slave guidelines
You should keep certain guidelines in mind when using an NIS slave.
The following guidelines apply to using the NIS slave:
- The root volume of your storage system must have sufficient space
to download maps for the NIS slave. Typically, the space required
in the root volume is same as the size of the maps on the NIS
server.
- If the root volume does not have enough space to download maps,
the following occurs:
- An error message is displayed informing you that the space on the disk is not sufficient to download or update the maps from the NIS master.
- If the maps cannot be downloaded, the NIS slave is disabled. Your storage system switches to using hosts map on the NIS server for name resolution.
- If the maps cannot be updated, your storage system continues to use the old maps.
- If the NIS master server was started with the -d option
or if the hosts.byname and hosts.byaddr maps
are generated with the -b option, your storage system
must have DNS enabled, DNS servers must be configured, and the
hosts entry in the /etc/nsswitch.conf file must contain DNS as an
option to use for host name lookup.
If you have your NIS server configured to do host name lookups
using DNS, or if you use DNS to resolve names that cannot be first
resolved using the hosts.by* maps, using the NIS slave
causes those lookups to fail, because when the NIS slave is used,
all lookups are performed locally using the downloaded maps.
However, if you configure DNS on your storage system as described
previously, the lookups succeed.
You can use the NIS slave for the following:
- vif and VLAN interfaces
- vFiler units
- storage system clusters
Note: You should ensure that the nis.servers options value is the same on
both cluster nodes and that the /etc/hosts file on both cluster
nodes can resolve the name of the NIS master server.
