Prerequisites to Populating a NIS+ Subdomain's Tables

Before you run the nispopulate script to populate the new master server's tables, be sure the following prerequisites have been met.

• The information in the files must be formatted appropriately for the table into which it will be loaded.

  • Before proceeding, view each local /etc file or NIS map that you will be loading data from. Make sure that there are no spurious or incorrect entries. Make sure that the right data is in the correct place and format. Remove any outdated, invalid, or corrupt entries. You should also remove any incomplete or partial entries. You can always add individual entries after configuration is completed. That is easier than trying to load incomplete or damaged entries.

  • If you are setting up a network for the first time, you may not have much network information stored anywhere. In that case, you'll need to first get the information and then enter it manually into the input file, which is essentially the same as an /etc file.

  • Make copies of the /etc files and use the copies to populate the tables instead of the actual ones for safety reasons. (This example uses files in a directory called /nis+files, for instance.)

• Edit four of the copied NIS table files, passwd, shadow, aliases, and hosts, for security reasons. For example, you might want to remove the following lines from the copy of your local passwd file so they are not distributed across the namespace.

  root:x:0:1:0000-Admin(0000):/:/sbin/sh daemon:x:1:3:0000-Admin(0000):/: bin:x:3:5:0000-Admin(0000):/usr/bin: sys:x:3:3:0000-Admin(0000):/: adm:x:4:4:0000-Admin(0000):/var/adm: lp:x:78:9:0000-lp(0000):/usr/spool/lp: smtp:x:0:0:mail daemon user:/: uucp:x:5:5:0000-uucp(0000):/usr/lib/uucp: nuucp:x:7:8:0000- uucp (0000):/var/spool/uucppublic:/usr/lib/uucp/uucico listen:x:22:6:Network Admin:/usr/net/nls: nobody:x:60000:60000:uid no body:/: noaccess:x:60002:60002:uid no access:/:

• The domain must have already been configured and its master server must be running.

• The domain's servers must have sufficient disk space to accommodate the new table information.

• You must be logged in as an NIS+ principal and have write permission to the NIS+ tables in the specified domain. In this example, you would have to be the user root on the machine client2.

The nispopulate script can fail if there is insufficient /tmp space on the system. To keep this from happening, you can set the environment variable TMPDIR to a different directory. If TMPDIR is not set to a valid directory, the script uses the /tmp directory instead.