Prerequisites to Running nispopulate to Populate Root Server Tables

Before you run the nispopulate script, be sure the following prerequisites have been met.

• View each local /etc file or NIS map from which you will load data. Make sure 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 Remove any outdated, invalid, or corrupt entries.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.

• The information in the files must be formatted appropriately for the table into which it will be loaded. Chapter 9, Setting Up NIS+ Tables describes the format required for a text file to be transferred into its corresponding NIS+ table.

• Make sure that domain and host names are different. Domains and hosts cannot have the same name. For example, if you have a sales domain you cannot have a machine named sales. Similarly, if you have a machine named home, do not create a domain named home. This caution also applies to subdomains. For example, if you have a machine named west, do not create a sales.west.doc.com subdomain.

• Remove all dots and underscores in host names. NIS+ uses dots (periods) to delimit between machine names and domains and between parent and subdomains, so you cannot have a machine name containing a dot. You also cannot use underscores in hostnames, since DNS does not allow it. Before running the nispopulate script, you must eliminate any dots in your host names. You can convert host name dots to hyphens. For example, you cannot have a machine named sales.alpha. You can convert that name to sales-alpha.

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

• For safety's sake, you should make copies of the /etc files and use the copies to populate the tables instead of the actual files. (This example uses files in a directory called /nisplusfiles, for instance.)

• Edit four of the copied NIS table files, passwd, shadow, aliases, and hosts, for security problems, particularly items that you do not want distributed across the namespace. For example, you might want to remove the following lines from the copy of your local passwd file so that they are not made available 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 server must have sufficient disk space to accommodate the new table information.

• You must be logged in as an NIS+ principal (a client with appropriate credentials) and have write permission to the NIS+ tables in the specified domain. In this example, you must be the user root on the machine master1.