YP required with NFS?

[Win Treese]

#include <line-eater-food.h>

Steve Blasingame writes:

>>Yes, yp is fundamentally the wrong way to do things. On SVR3 RFS you
>>can also do what you are talking about. Just use remote versions of any
>>files in question either via a symlink (on a sun) OR by just remotely
>>mounting
>>a subtree over the one on a client machine. This may cleaner and easier
>>to manage. I have seen the latter on RFS and it is much more reasonable.
>>The clients also tend to survive server crashes quite well.
>>

This scheme (symlinks) symlinks doesn't scale very well, though.  One of the
main problems is robustness.  In a large network (say, a couple of hundred
workstations), you may have several different servers for a particular
network service.  For something like hostname resolution, it is important to
be able to talk to a different server if your primary one crashes.  This
doesn't work with symbolic links.  A distributed nameserver package (such as
Berkeley's BIND, included with 4.3) offers this flexibility.

BIND may also be extended to provide more general resolution of names
on a network, giving information about locations of services (such as
printing) available through the network.  This may not seem important
on a local Ethernet with about six workstations on it, but can be a major
headache when trying to manage a few hundred all at once.

	Win Treese
	Systems Engineer
	MIT Project Athena

ARPA: treese at athena.MIT.EDU
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