Designating NIS+ Preferred Servers

The Solaris release contains a new feature – server-use customization – that allows you to control the order in which clients search for NIS+ servers.

With this new feature you can balance and customize server usage by:

• Specifying that clients prefer (search for) certain servers over others.

• Specify whether or not clients are permitted to use remote servers if no local servers are available.

The search criteria that you specify can be applied to all clients within a domain, all clients on a subnet, or to individual clients on a machine-by-machine basis.

When server-use preferences are set for a particular machine, those preferences apply to all users, applications, processes, or other clients running on that machine. You cannot set different server-use patterns for different clients on the same machine.