Designating a Non-Default Naming Service

By default:

• If fncreate is executed on a machine that is an NIS+ client or server, the FNS namespace will be set up in NIS+. (See How to Replicate FNS Under NIS+ if you want or need to designate some other machine as an FNS NIS+ master server.)

• If the machine is an NIS client, the namespace will be set up in NIS.

• If the machine is neither, the namespace will be set up in the machine's /var/fn directory. When your underlying naming system is files-based, the common practice is to create /var/fn by running fncreate on each machine. It is possible however to create /var/fn on one machine and export it by NFS to be mounted by other clients.

You can also explicitly specify a non-default target naming service by using the fnselect command. For example the following command selects the target naming service to be NIS.

# fnselect nis