Re: Having problems with NIS

[jim@mercury.laney.edu]

> 
> Date:    Sat, 03 Jul 1999 11:36:42 PDT
> To:      seul-edu@seul.org
> From:    Robert Hopcroft <hopcroft@uswest.net>
> Subject: Having problems with NIS
> 
> Daniel Glenn asked:
> 
> > Here at White Horse we had some local college students setup our LINUX
> > network. They've gone home for the summer, so we're doing things on our
> > own. I've spent some time trying to find out how to addusers that can be
> > accessed across the whole network, but have been unable to do so.
> > We are running RedHat 6.0. I know everything is working, I can log into
> > my account from anywhere on the network. But I cannot figure out how to
> > add a new user. Where is the file that I modify for this? What do I put
> > in? I found the passwd file that linuxconf adds to, but I can't find the
> > file that NIS wants.
> 
> I have not seen a response to this request. Does anyone know? Daniel, if
> there is no response here, you might try asking on linux-list@ssc.com. I
> watch that list and if I see a response which is not also sent to you, I
> will forward it to you.

I have very limited knowledge of NIS, but I also have the book, and I'll
start by trying to answer from my own knowledge.

First, to identify the server -and- the clients that talk to the server,
there is the "NIS domain name". One would set this using the command
domainname, in the form "domainname <name of domain>".

I'll note briefly here that any <...> is a syntatic concept (or syntatic
entity) that would get replaced by a concrete thing. For example, if your
NIS domain name is FRED, then you would type domainname FRED to set your
domain name on that server.

On -one- of the machines, you have a NIS server running, and what it does
essentially is serve up databases, called "NIS maps", to clients who ask
things like "give me the passwd file entry for johnnystudent".

If you first set the domain name to one chosen name (say myschool) on
two machines, then you start the nis server on one and a nis client on
the other, then the client can ask questions of the server's database.

The only other thing I recall personally is that you can rebuild the NIS
maps on the server machine by changing to the directory holding the maps
(and a special file called Makefile) and typing make.

I'll look around for the book and continue this.

-Jim