Setting up NIS

Setting up NIS clients for broadcasting

NIS clients can broadcast to find available NIS servers on the same subnet. In order to use this broadcast capability, you must edit the file /var/yp/binding/domainname/ypservers on the client machine. If this file contains entries that begin with either ``+'' (plus sign) or ``'' (asterisk), broadcasting will be used to locate NIS servers.

A ``+'' entry in /var/yp/binding/domainname/ypservers indicates that only responses from servers whose names are listed in the ypservers file should be used. Thus, in the following example, only responses from servers eagle and falcon would be used:

   eagle
   falcon
   +

and a response from a server named hornet would be ignored. In this case, the client must be able to resolve addresses to host names via some mechanism other than NIS. For example, the client could look up entries in /etc/hosts or it could use DNS.

On the other hand, responses from any server would be used if /var/yp/binding/domainname/ypservers contained a ``'' entry like this:

   eagle
   falcon

The set of networks over which NIS will broadcast can be restricted by including network ID entries in the /var/yp/binding/domainname/ypservers file. For example,

   eagle
   falcon
   +.netid

would limit responses only to those returned from servers eagle and falcon on the set of networks defined by netid, and

   eagle
   falcon
   .netid

would limit responses only to those returned from any of the servers on the set of networks defined by netid. For more information about network IDs, see the netconfig(4bnu) manual page.