Transition Principles

Before you begin the transition, you should review the following basic principles:

Consider the Alternatives to Making the Transition Immediately

You can defer the upgrade to NIS+ until after your site has completed its transition to the Solaris operating environment. This allows you to focus your resources on one transition effort at a time. You can continue to run NIS under the Solaris operating environment until you are ready to make the transition to NIS+.

Keep Things Simple

You can take several steps to simplify the transition. While these steps will diminish the effectiveness of NIS+, they will consume fewer servers and less administrative time. After the transition is complete, you can change the NIS+ setup to better suit your needs. Here are some suggestions:

• Do not change domain names.

• Do not use any hierarchies; keep a flat NIS+ namespace.

• Use the NIS-compatibility features.

• Use default tables and directory structures.

• Do not establish credentials for clients, if you are running the Solaris 2.5 Release or later.

Use a Single Release of Software

Decide which version of the Solaris operating environmenta and NIS+ you will use for the transition. Because there are slight differences between versions, using multiple versions could needlessly complicate the transition process. Choose one version of the Solaris product and use its corresponding version of NIS+.

The current release has the most features (such as setup scripts). Make sure you compile a list of the Solaris operating environment patches that are required for normal operation, and make sure that all servers and clients have the same patches loaded.

Minimize Impact on Client Users

Consider the two major user-related factors: First, users should not notice any change in service. Second, the transition phase itself should cause minimal disruption to client users. To ensure the second consideration, be sure the administrators responsible for each domain migrate their client machines to NIS+, rather than ask the users to implement the migration. This ensures that proper procedures are implemented, that procedures are consistent across client machines, and that irregularities can be dealt with immediately by the administrator.

Things You Should Not Do

• Do not change the name services currently provided by NIS or change the way NIS functions.

• Do not change the structure of DNS.

• Do not change the IP network topology.

• Do not upgrade applications that use NIS to NIS+; leave the migration to NIS+ APIs for the future.

• Do not consider additional uses for NIS+ during the implementation phase; add them later.