NIS?

[Jim Phillips]

On Wed, 3 Oct 2001, Donald Becker wrote:

> The best-practice approach for other cluster types is to specify "files"
> (use local files) in nsswitch, and to use rdist/rsync to periodically
> update the /etc/{passwd,group,hosts} files.

We encountered problems with NIS when we set up our first (pre-Scyld)
Linux cluster.  The elegant solution we eventually came up with was to
list both "files" and "nis" in the nsswitch file, but with files first so
that NIS would only get hit if the information wasn't in the file.  Then a
cron job would run ypcat hourly to update the files to match yp.  This
worked quite well, although the script had to deal with ypcat failures in
such a way that you didn't end up with an empty passwd file.

-Jim