SUMMARY: NIS & network problems

From: Mike van der Velden [243] (mvanderv@glenayre.com)
Date: Tue Oct 19 1993 - 06:21:23 CDT


Thanks to everyone who replied to my query about NIS & network
problems. To recap, I had recently pulled one NIS slave from
the network (a SS2), and made a nearby SS10 a new NIS slave.
After doing that, the network became excrutiatingly slow for
days on end, and I was having trouble pushing yp maps. Whenever
I manually tried to do ypmake, I kept getting error messages like:

    Can't bind master to send ypclear message to ypserv for <map>
    No response from ypxfr on <slave>

And some NIS maps would be missing from some slaves. Some of
the things I tried (without success):
    - rerunning "ypinit -m" on the master, and "ypinit -s"
      on the slaves.
    - rebooting the master and the slaves
    - running yppush manually

Net people suggested:
    - creating my own /etc/ypservers file and ypservers map,
      rather than relying on ypinit -m to do it for me.
    - making sure that I wasn't using my own ypservers map,
      but using the one created by ypinit -m.
      (this is my situation)
    - making sure that DNS timeouts weren't responsible.
      (don't know how to check this)
    - ftp the NIS binary files to all slaves.
    - run ypxfr manually. (as opposed to yppush?)
    - making sure ypserv and ypxfrd were running. (they were)
    - get rid of all slaves and see if the master can accept
      the maps by itself.
    - gut the NIS completely and install fresh with all the
      maps in place.
    - making sure that one or more processes weren't
      holding up the net (eg. NIS or automount)
    - check to see that one of the slave servers wasn't ypinit'ed
      while the master server was bound to an "old" or non-
      existent other slave server. (not 100% sure whether or
      not this would be a problem that wouldn't get resolved
      with the regular timeouts).

In lieu of a network sniffer, people told me to try several
programs:
    "etherfind -r -ip"
        The output from this is rather difficult to decipher.
        Anyone got any tips on this? (even RTFM would be nice,
        as long as you tell me which FM to R)
    "nfswatch"
        A very informative program!
    "tcpdump"
        I didn't have access to this program, so I couldn't try
        it out.

The network slowness disappeared after about 5 days, and I don't
remember doing anything to solve the problem. I did re-check
cable connections a couple of times and took out a small length
of unnecessary cable, but that didn't coincide with the network
speeding up again. *sigh*

The NIS problems persisted. Whenever I would make a change to one
of the NIS ASCII files on the master and run ypmake, I'd get the
aforementioned error messages, and the map would no longer be visible
to anyone not bound to the NIS master. Eg. "ypcat aliases" would
generate the error message "no such map in server's domain".

I checked the SunSolve 2.0 CD, and did the things it suggested:
    SRDB ID 1006
        Reinitialize the master and slaves with "ypinit -m" and
        "ypinit -s master" (no luck)
    SRDB ID 2490
        Check that maps are not bound to a ypslave by doing a
        "ypwhich -m". (they weren't, but if they were I'd have
         had to disable the ypslave and yppushing again).
    SRDB ID 2908
        rcp the maps to the NIS slave by hand.

That last solution did the trick! Once I rcp'd all the missing
maps to the slaves that yppush was complaining about, everything
worked fine!

Now, my question is, why doesn't "ypinit -s" correctly destroy
the existing maps on the slave and pull over all the correct maps?
Maps that were missing before the ypinit were still missing
afterwards. This does not seem like correct behaviour, IMHO.
Is this a bug or a feature?

Anyway, thanks to all of those who responeded for their time
and suggestions! Much appreciated.

    johnb@edge.CIS.McMaster.CA (John Benjamins)
    mrh@io.nosc.mil (Mike Halderman)
    bert@penril.com (Bert Robbins)
    strombrg@hydra.acs.uci.edu (Dan Stromberg)
    vlsiphx!perlotto@enuucp.eas.asu.edu (Richard E. Perlotto II)
    kmah@DCS-Systems.COM (Kevin Mah)
    louis@andataco.com (Dances on keyboards)
    kevin@uniq.com.au (Kevin Sheehan {Consulting Poster Child})

----
Mike van der Velden                    mvanderv@glenayre.com
Glenayre Electronics, Ltd.             604-293-1611, x243
Vancouver, BC.



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