Network Information Service (NIS) B.11.31.02 Administrator's Guide

Startup Scripts in NIS Services
This section discusses the startup sequence for the NIS daemons during a normal system boot.
Following are the NIS startup scripts:
• /sbin/init.d/nis.server
• /sbin/init.d/nis.client
These scripts can be used to start and stop NIS on a system. They also read the
/etc/rc.config.d/namesvrs file to determine the daemons that must be started, and detect
whether the system is a server or a client.
The nis.server script is executed at system run level 2 on the NIS server. This script performs
the following tasks:
• Starts rpcbind if it is not already running.
• Sets the domainname.
• Starts the ypserv daemon if it is not already running on both the master and the slave
servers.
• Starts ypxfrd if it is not already running on both the master and the slave servers.
• Starts yppasswdd if it is not already running on the master server.
• Starts ypupdated if it is not already running on the master server.
• Starts keyserv if it is not already running on the master server.
The nis.client script is executed at run level 2 on the systems configured as NIS client. This
script performs the following tasks:
• Starts the rpcbind daemon if it is not already running.
• Sets the domainname.
• Starts ypbind if it is not already running.
• Starts keyserv if it is not already running.
Features in NIS
This section discusses the new NIS features supported on HP-UX 11i v3:
• DNS Forwarding Mode
DNS forwarding mode can now be enabled through a new option -d to the NIS server
daemon, ypserv. When you run the NIS server in the DNS forwarding mode, if ypserv
does not find the host or ipnode entry in the NIS host or ipnode database, ypserv
automatically forwards the host or ipnode queries to DNS. This feature is useful in
configurations where certain host or ipnode entries are present in the NIS repository and a
different set of entries are present in the DNS repository. For example, if you store the host
information for host X in NIS and host Y in DNS. If the hosts entry in the
/etc/nsswitch.conf contains only nis (hosts: nis), the information for host Y is
retrieved even though dns is not specified in the hosts entry.
NIS automatically fetches the information from DNS and this operation is transparent to
the user or the application. You can achieve this tranparency without changing the
/etc/nsswitch.confconfiguration file.
• Shadow Password Mode
The NIS password daemon, rpc.yppasswdd, now supports the HP-UX shadow password
mode. In shadow password mode, the HP-UX system maintains the user passwords in a
different file called shadow, and replaces the encrypted password in the passwd file with
x. This enhances the password security of the system. You can convert a system to shadow
mode using the command pwconv, and revert the system using the command pwunconv.
For more information, see pwconv(1M) and pwunconv (1M).
16 Introduction