So, over the last week I have been trying to get NIS to work with OpenSolaris in VirtualBox machines.
I managed to get the master server to work fine by doing the following:
- Make sure all hosts are in /etc/inet/hosts
- Install SUNWyp
- Set the domain name like so: domainname mydomain
- Create the default domain file to make domain name persistent across reboots: domainname > /etc/defaultdomain
- touch ethers, bootparams and netgroup in /etc
- Copy /etc/nsswitch.nis to /etc/nsswitch.conf
- Run ypinit -m and answer questions
This list should have started all of the necessary NIS services. Setting up the clients proved a little more difficult. All of the documentation I found said to do the following:
- Make sure all hosts are in /etc/inet/hosts
- Install SUNWyp
- Set the domain name like so: domainname mydomain
- Create the default domain file to make domain name persistent across reboots: domainname > /etc/defaultdomain
- Copy /etc/nsswitch.nis to /etc/nsswitch.conf
- Run ypinit -c and name the NIS master server
- Start NIS client service with svcadm enable nis/client
However, this didn’t work. I tried using host names and IP addresses to identify the NIS master when ypinit asked me to specify it, but it wouldn’t work.
As a work around I found that if you don’t specify a master server at all, ypbind will use the -broadcast option and find the master automatically. Using the method above and staerting ypbind -broadcast myself didn’t seem to work.
This all works on OpenSolaris 2009.06