Date: Mon, 15 Jan 2001 02:32:37 -0800 From: Dima Dorfman <dima@unixfreak.org> To: "Paul A. Howes" <pahowes@fair-ware.com> Cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Laptop Computer As NIS Client... Message-ID: <20010115103242.808233E02@bazooka.unixfreak.org> In-Reply-To: Message from "Paul A. Howes" <pahowes@fair-ware.com> of "Sun, 14 Jan 2001 14:22:26 EST." <BCEFKOJHNDEAJONMKMHEAEBICGAA.pahowes@fair-ware.com>
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> This is a multi-part message in MIME format. Please don't send HTML e-mail to the list. > Handbook, discovered that NIS clients don't work if the NIS server cannot be > found. For very, very strong definitions of "not work," that is! It'd be one thing if you couldn't log in, but in reality, you can't do much more than a `cd`. You'd be surprised at the percentage of programs that access the password database in one way or another. Then there's DNS, which only aggregates the problem. > > I have a laptop computer that I would like to use in a NIS environment, but > being a mobile system, it would be frequently disconnected from the network. > Would the correct answer be to make it a NIS slave server as well as a > client? I was thinking that if the client portion authenticates against the This will work, but whether it is the Right Thing To Do(tm) is unclear. One one hand, a laptop certainly shouldn't be any kind of server; on the other hand, it solves your problem. > local slave server, and the NIS database is pushed to the local slave server > when it is connected to the network, it should be able to stay in sync with > the master server. As far as I can see, this is the only real problem with the method you describe. How do you sync it with the master server? Normally, when you update a map on the master, it pushes the updated one to all of its slaves. You can't do that in this case, so you have to resort to the pull method: slaves periodically pull the maps from the master. A laptop can't really do that, either, unless you're either prepared to deal with lots of error notifications, or no error notifications, even if something goes wrong; IMO, neither one is fully acceptable. You can manually pull the maps when you connect it to your network, but then part of the glee of NIS (hand-off-all-but-the-master) is gone. Dima Dorfman dima@unixfreak.org To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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