"Sivo, Peter " peter.sivo@netapp.com writes:

Is this the reason that you all do this? I thought it was because Corp IT never had reliable NIS services and you were binding to a server that you knew was "blessed" and stable?

On the whole, our NIS servers are rock solid. We bind to a specific IP address for the reasons Jay stated (namely we know not to trust NIS, and especially NIS broadcasts as far as we can throw it/them).

The questions, though, is that are people going to continue to hardcode in a server, so even if I had 5 NIS servers/slaves per network, it wouldn't make a difference?

There are two separate issues here:

1) The current NetApp NIS client code (especially when run with a single server specified as we do) isn't particularly robust. If we could specify 5 IP addresses instead of one, and the failover went smoothly, this would help quite a bit. Plus you could specify hosts in a different broadcast domain (perhaps on a more protected subnet).

2) NIS will never be secure, but being able to tell a filer not to pay attention to any one who pretends to be your NIS server (via specifying addresses) is a good thing. Not the perfect thing, but better than the current status quo.

Besides the scenario Jay proposed where the rogue server is available before the real one after a power blink, you could also probably throw enough of a denial-of-service against either the filer or the NIS server to cause the filer to attempt a rebind. If your filer rebinds to the rogue...

To directly answer your question, it's the sixth NIS server on your net (that you didn't put there) that's the real bummer.

Peace, dNb eagerly looking forward to the new NIS code