Date: Sun, 19 Jan 1997 22:54:47 -0500 (EST) From: Bill Paul <wpaul@skynet.ctr.columbia.edu> To: yves@CC.McGill.CA (Yves Lepage) Cc: hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Re: NIS breakage Message-ID: <199701200354.WAA02831@skynet.ctr.columbia.edu> In-Reply-To: <199701200049.TAA18520@maelstrom.CC.McGill.CA> from "Yves Lepage" at Jan 19, 97 07:49:26 pm
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Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, Yves Lepage had to walk into mine and say: > Hi, > > I use FreeBSD's implementation of NIS for production. > > Although broken, it's the cleanest and most stable implementation > that I've been using. Which is why we use this one as opposed to using > Sun's. > > I use huge maps (huge, from NIS's point of view) and 38k doesn't > seem to be a limit for me. It's true though that I use 2.1.5. You use 2.1.5 as a production NIS server? Wow. Even I don't like the 2.1.5 ypserv, and I'm responsible for it being there. :) For the record, I use a sample passwd map with 30,000+ entries in it for testing the 2.2 ypserv. (This represents the actual user database on the Columbia student UNIX cluster.) The 2.1.x ypserv should be able to handle this size map as well, though not as fast. > Problems that I have seen in FreeBSD's NIS: > > - ypcat is broken. a 'ypcat passwd' doesn't give me nearly > as many entries as there are in the map > > - yp_mkdb -u gives me slightly better results but some entries > are still missing. > > The only way I have found so far to compare a map and the master.passwd > file is to extract usernames from the master.passwd and ypmatch them all > against the passwd.byname map. I have to do this because sometimes, > some entries will be "forgotten" by the maps building process. This > doesn't happen very often, fortunately. > > Yves Lepage Hm. I'd be interested to know if you could try 2.2 as an NIS server and see what happens. The ypserv in the 2.1.x branch is kinda crufty. It's based on an older version of the Linux ypserv which I cut down and coerced into working on FreeBSD. While it does work, it could use a cleanup and some added features. For one thing, it doesn't cache open DB handles, which makes it somewhat slower than the 2.2 ypserv. There are some cases where yp_mkdb will reject entries from a map source file: it does not permit maps to be created with duplicate keys, and it won't allow entries with keys or data longer than 1024 bytes. This is the yp_mkdb in 2.2 though; I'm not sure why the one from 2.1.x would be dropping records. In case anyone hasn't realized it yet, the NIS server support from the 2.1.x branch is being laid to rest and is being replaced by an all new set of tools in 2.2. The client library has also undergone some changes to (hopefully) improve performance. -Bill -- ============================================================================= -Bill Paul (212) 854-6020 | System Manager, Master of Unix-Fu Work: wpaul@ctr.columbia.edu | Center for Telecommunications Research Home: wpaul@skynet.ctr.columbia.edu | Columbia University, New York City ============================================================================= "It is not I who am crazy; it is I who am mad!" - Ren Hoek, "Space Madness" =============================================================================
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