Managing NFS and NIS, 2nd Edition - Mike Eisler [8]
I started on the second edition while working for Sun. Special thanks to my manager at the time, Cindy Vinores, for encouraging me to take on the responsibility for co-authoring this book. Thanks also to my successive managers at Sun, Karen Spackman, David Brittle, and Cindy again, and to Emily Watts, my manager at Zambeel, Inc., for giving me the equipment, software, and most of all, time to write.
Ricardo Labiaga readily agreed to sign on to help write this book when several members of the second edition writing team had to back out, and thus took a big load off my shoulders.
This book was written using Adobe's Framemaker document editor. During the year 2000, Adobe made available to the world a free beta that ran on Linux. I thank Adobe for doing so, as it allowed me to make lots of progress while traveling on airliners.
Ricardo Labiaga's acknowledgments
Hal, Mike E., and Mike L., I have truly enjoyed working with you on this edition. Thank you; it's been an honor and a great experience.
I did most of the work on the second edition while working for the Solaris File Sharing Group at Sun Microsystems, Inc. I thank my manager at the time, Bev Crair, who enthusiastically encouraged me to sign up for the project and provided the resources to coauthor this edition. I also thank my successive managers at Sun, David Brittle and Penny Solin, for providing the necessary resources to complete the endeavor.
Words are not enough to thank my friends and colleagues at Sun and elsewhere, who answered many questions and provided much insight into the technologies. Special thanks to David Robinson for his technical and professional guidance throughout the years, as well as his invaluable feedback on the material presented in this book. Many thanks to Peter Staubach and Brent Callaghan for the time spent discussing what NFS should and should not do. Thanks to Mohan Parthasarathy and David Comay of Solaris Internet Engineering for answering my many questions about routing concepts. Thanks to Carl Williams and Sebastien Roy for their explanations of the IPv6 protocol. Thanks to Jim Mauro and Richard McDougall for providing the original Solaris priority paging information presented in Chapter 17. Thanks to Jeff Mogul of Compaq for his review of the NFSWATCH material, and Narendra Chaparala for introducing me to ethereal.
I wish to thank Dr. David H. Williams of The University of Texas at El Paso, for providing me the opportunity to work as a system administrator in the Unix lab, where I had my first encounter with Unix and networking twelve years ago. I thank my parents from the bottom of my heart, for their encouragement throughout the years, and for their many sacrifices that made my education possible.
My deepest gratitude goes to my wife, Kara, for her encouragement, understanding, and awesome support throughout the writing of this book. Thank you for putting up with my late hours, work weekends, and late dinner dates.
Chapter 1. Networking Fundamentals
The Network Information Service (NIS) and Network File System (NFS) are services that allow you to build distributed computing systems that are both consistent in their appearance and transparent in the way files and data are shared.
NIS provides a distributed database system for common configuration files. NIS servers manage copies of the database files, and NIS clients request information from the servers instead of using their own, local copies of these files. For example, the /etc/hosts file is managed by NIS. A few NIS servers manage copies of the information in the hosts file, and all NIS clients ask these servers for host address information instead of looking in their own /etc/hosts file. Once NIS is running, it is no longer necessary to manage every /etc/hosts file on every machine in the network — simply updating the NIS servers ensures that all machines will be able to retrieve the new configuraton file information.
NFS is a distributed filesystem. An NFS server has one or more filesystems that are