We orignally used NIS for some time but we gave up because of various problems with the NetApp software, occasional network glitches and the chicken-and-egg problems when coming up after a power failure.
NetApp have probably fixed all the bugs by now, but it's a fairly trivial task to hack the Makefile on your NIS master so that it copies the passwd, group and netgroup files to all your filers whenever they have changed. This is funcionally very similar to having the filers act as their own slave server!
So here are my tips, some of them learned the hard way:
1) Avoid NIS and copy the NIS data to each filer
2) If you do use NIS, ensure that a local NIS server will still boot even if the filers are down. Care with the /etc/init.d files and use of the automounter will help here. The NIS data (eg on /var/yp) should be on a local disk even if the master files from which they are generated reside on a filer.
3) Ensure that your DNS servers will boot without the filers. Again it's a good idea for their DNS data to be on a local disk, regularly updated from a master copy on a filer.
-- Dave Atkin, Head of Technical Services Computing Service, University of York, YORK YO10 5DD Phone: +44-1904-433804 (ddi) Fax: +44-1904-433740 Email: D.Atkin@york.ac.uk