System Administration Guide: Naming and Directory Services (DNS, NIS, and LDAP)

NIS and the Service Management Facility

The NIS service is managed by the Service Management Facility. For an overview of SMF, refer to Chapter 18, Managing Services (Overview), in System Administration Guide: Basic Administration. Also refer to the svcadm(1M) and svcs(1) man pages for more details.

Administrative actions on this service, such as enabling, disabling, or restarting, can be performed by using the svcadm command. However, ypstart and ypstop can also be used from the command line to start or stop NIS. See the ypstart(1M) and ypstop(1M) man pages for more information.

Tip –
Temporarily disabling a service by using the -t option provides some protection for the service configuration. If the service is disabled with the -t option, the original settings would be restored for the service after a reboot. If the service is disabled without -t, the service will remain disabled after reboot.
The NIS Fault Managed Resource Identifiers (FMRIs) are svc:/network/nis/server:<instance> for the NIS server and svc:/network/nis/client:<instance> for the NIS client.

You can query the status of NIS by using the svcs command.

Examples of svcs command and output.

# svcs network/nis/server
STATE        STIME    FMRI
online       Jan_10   svc:/network/nis/server:default

# svcs \*nis\*
STATE          STIME    FMRI
disabled       12:39:18 svc:/network/rpc/nisplus:default
disabled       12:39:18 svc:/network/nis/server:default
disabled       12:39:20 svc:/network/nis/passwd:default
disabled       12:39:20 svc:/network/nis/update:default
disabled       12:39:20 svc:/network/nis/xfr:default
online         12:42:16 svc:/network/nis/client:default

Example of svcs -l command and output.

# svcs -l /network/nis/client
fmri         svc:/network/nis/client:default
enabled      true
state        online
next_state   none
restarter    svc:/system/svc/restarter:default
contract_id  99
dependency   exclude_all/none svc:/network/nis/server (offline)
dependency   require_all/none svc:/system/identity:domain (online)
dependency   require_all/restart svc:/network/rpc/bind (online)
dependency   require_all/none svc:/system/filesystem/minimal (online)

You can use the svccfg utility to get more detailed information about a service. See the svccfg(1M) man page.
You can check a daemon's presence by using the ps command.
# ps -e | grep rpcbind daemon 100806 1 0 Sep 01 ? 25:28 /usr/sbin/rpcbind
Note –
Do not use the -f option with ps because this option attempts to translate user IDs to names, which causes more naming service lookups that might not succeed.