Re: SUMMARY: making Sun DNS hostname resolving work without running NIS

From: Barry Margolin (barmar@think.com)
Date: Sat Jul 18 1992 - 23:45:36 CDT


In article <3299@blue.cis.pitt.edu.UUCP> qralston@gl.pitt.edu writes:
>1. Give in to Sun's belief that everyone loooooves and uses NIS;
> install NIS; set up an NIS server.
>
> For a lot of people, this is not a practical solution. Many
>organizations are working towards a distributed network, in which each
>machine depends on as few as other machines as possible (AFS and DFS
>are two prime examples.) In this case, installing NIS and having all
>of your machines depending on one NIS server for resolving hostnames
>is taking a step backwards instead of forwards.

You don't have to rely on "one NIS server". You can have as many NIS
servers as you want; if one fails, its clients will switch to another one.

> In addition, unless the domain name server is also the NIS
>server, for hostnames that are not known locally, this makes more work
>for the NIS master server, and more network traffic.

It's not done by the NIS master server, it's done by whichever NIS server
the client asks. And it may result in fewer DNS queries, since all the
clients of that server will share its cache. If resolving were done on the
clients, each client would have to query for the same host.

-- 
Barry Margolin
System Manager, Thinking Machines Corp.

barmar@think.com {uunet,harvard}!think!barmar



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