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What is Filer NIS slave on Data ONTAP?

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Applies to

Data ONTAP 7 and earlier

Answer

Data ONTAP 7.1 will have a NIS slave running on the filer. The slave can be turned on/off using the following option

options nis.slave.enable on | off

Once the maps are downloaded by the slave, all NIS requests are serviced using the downloaded maps. There will not be any NIS requests going to the NIS servers. If the slave is disabled, the filer will revert back to the client behavior. The slave has two major functions:

  1. Download the maps from the NIS master: The NIS slave checks every 45 min with the master server for updates. If there are updates, these updates are downloaded.
  2. Service YPPUSH requests. All other NIS/YP requests are denied. If the filer is configured as a slave on the NIS master, when the maps on the master are updated, the administrator has an option to notify all the slaves.

Resolving the NIS master

When the NIS slave is turned on, the information about the NIS master is obtained from the configured nis.servers.

Note: The NIS master may be different from the configured nis.servers The IP address of the master is resolved using NIS or the local /etc/hosts file on the filer. If the NIS master does not have an entry in the hosts map or the local /etc/hosts file, the NIS slave on the filer will not be able to contact the master.

Downloaded Maps

The downloaded maps are stored under /etc/yp/<NIS_domain_name>/. There needs to be sufficient space on the root volume of the filer to download maps for the slave to function correctly. The Amount of space needed depends on the size of the maps. It takes almost the same size as maps on the NIS server.

The maps are stored in a DB file and you can verify the data in each of the map db files using a db_dump185 ¡§Cp <map_name>.

Changes to nis info

The status of the NIS slave will be displayed as part of the nis info. Here is a sample. NIS Slave Enabled NIS Master Server nwk-c72.solaris.netapp.com NIS Map Last Checked Time Mon Feb 28 14:50:15 PST 2005

External NIS clients

The NIS slave running on the filer does not respond to remote NIS client requests and thus cannot be used by other NIS clients for name lookups.

 You can use the NIS slave for the following:

  • Vif and VLAN interfaces
  • vFiler units
  • Storage system clusters

Additional Information

Related Links:

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