6.1. Determine
whether you are a Server, Slave or Client.
To answer this question you have to consider two cases:
-
Your machine is going to be part of a network with existing NIS
servers
-
You do not have any NIS servers in the network yet
In the first case, you only need the client programs (ypbind,
ypwhich, ypcat, yppoll, ypmatch). The most important program is
ypbind. This program must be running at all times, which means, it
should always appear in the list of processes. It is a daemon
process and needs to be started from the system's startup file (eg.
/etc/init.d/nis, /sbin/init.d/ypclient, /etc/rc.d/init.d/ypbind,
/etc/rc.local). As soon as ypbind is running your system has become
a NIS client.
In the second case, if you don't have NIS servers, then you will
also need a NIS server program (usually called ypserv). Section 9 describes how to set up a NIS server on
your Linux machine using the ypserv
daemon.
