Our Machines

Now we're at the point where we can start to build our machines, so let's decide how they will be configured.

We will put all the machines on the network (in both subnets) under the control of NIS. We want to have at least one slave server for redundancy, so rather than just having the master server on the multihomed host, we've decided to add a slave to each subnet too. Earlier versions of NIS dictated that there had to be a server on each subnet that contained clients. Although this limitation no longer applies, it's still a common configuration to use. Following this convention, we've decided to use the machines listed in Table 12.7 as our servers.

The Packages

As usual, we'll check that the correct packages are installed before we start. We're using Solaris 9, but let's assume Solaris 2.6 is the oldest revision we refer to, as prior to this we also had to load a package known as the “NIS kit.” This provided us with the means of running a NIS server on a Solaris 2 system. This package has since been removed and is now part of the standard Solaris release.

In theory, the required packages will also alter depending on whether we are building a master, slave, or client. But for consistency between the machines, we will install all of them on every one. The added advantage is that if we need to alter the function of a machine, say from client to server, it can be easily carried out (also the additional packages are quite small so it doesn't place any great overhead on disk space requirements).

tin# pkginfo SUNWypr SUNWypu SUNWnisr SUNWnisu
system      SUNWypr        NIS Server for Solaris (root)
system      SUNWypu        NIS Server for Solaris (usr)
system      SUNWnisr       Network Information System, (Root)
system      SUNWnisu       Network Information System, (Usr)
tin#

A makefile is included as part of the NIS distribution. This is used by the master to perform the build and distribution of the NIS maps, as we explained earlier. We also mentioned that make was part of another package, so let's make sure this is installed too:

tin# pkginfo SUNWsprot
system      SUNWsprot      Solaris Bundled tools
tin#