SUNWyp - A.K.A. NIS

So, over the last week I have been trying to get NIS to work with OpenSolaris in VirtualBox machines.

I managed to get the master server to work fine by doing the following:

1. Make sure all hosts are in /etc/inet/hosts

2. Install SUNWyp

3. Set the domain name like so: domainname mydomain

4. Create the default domain file to make domain name persistent across reboots: domainname > /etc/defaultdomain

5. touch ethers, bootparams and netgroup in /etc

6. Copy /etc/nsswitch.nis to /etc/nsswitch.conf

7. Run ypinit -m and answer questions This list should have started all of the necessary NIS services. Setting up the clients proved a little more difficult. All of the documentation I found said to do the following:

8. Make sure all hosts are in /etc/inet/hosts

9. Install SUNWyp

10. Set the domain name like so: domainname mydomain

11. Create the default domain file to make domain name persistent across reboots: domainname > /etc/defaultdomain

12. Copy /etc/nsswitch.nis to /etc/nsswitch.conf

13. Run ypinit -c and name the NIS master server

14. Start NIS client service with svcadm enable nis/client

However, this didn’t work. I tried using host names and IP addresses to identify the NIS master when ypinit asked me to specify it, but it wouldn’t work. As a work around I found that if you don’t specify a master server at all, ypbind will use the -broadcast option and find the master automatically. Using the method above and starting ypbind -broadcast myself didn’t seem to work.

This all works on OpenSolaris 2009.06