Guidelines for using NIS slaves

When using an NIS slave, you should follow certain guidelines, such as the available space in the storage system, conditions for enabling DNS, and supported configurations.

The following guidelines apply when using the NIS slave:

•	The root volume of your storage system must have sufficient space to download maps for the NIS slave. Typically, the space required in the root volume is same as the size of the maps on the NIS server.

•	If the root volume does not have enough space to download maps, the following occurs:

•	An error message is displayed informing you that the space on the disk is not sufficient to download or update the maps from the NIS master.

•	If the maps cannot be downloaded, the NIS slave is disabled. Your storage system switches to using hosts map on the NIS server for name resolution.

•	If the maps cannot be updated, your storage system continues to use the old maps.

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If the NIS master server was started with the -d option or if the hosts.byname and hosts.byaddr maps are generated with the -b option, your storage system must have DNS enabled, DNS servers must be configured, and the hosts entry in the /etc/nsswitch.conf file must contain DNS as an option to use for host name lookup.

If you have your NIS server configured to perform host name lookups using DNS, or if you use DNS to resolve names that cannot be first resolved using the hosts.by* maps, using the NIS slave causes those lookups to fail. This is because when the NIS slave is used, all lookups are performed locally using the downloaded maps. However, if you configure DNS on your storage system, the lookups succeed.

You can use the NIS slave for the following:

•	Interface groups and VLAN interfaces

•	vFiler units

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HA pairs

Note: In an HA pair, you should ensure that the nis.servers options value is the same on both nodes and that the /etc/hosts file on both nodes can resolve the name of the NIS master server.