"Brian C. Grayson" writes:
>  Note that my reason for posting here, and not to a FreeBSD
>list, is because we have had problems with a NetBSD NIS server and
>{FreeBSD,Linux,Solaris} clients.  It may be that all of them have
>flaky clients, for all I know.
>  I'm sure other people use NetBSD NIS servers with other OS
>clients, so I'm sure it is supposed to work!

I have posted before about a problem with ypserv on NetBSD/i386.
My problem was not the same as yours.  I have NetBSD-1.3.1, but I
do not think that any of the NIS code has changed in a while.

NetBSD is a slave server, with a SunOS4 system being the master,
serving HPs, AIXs, SunOSs, Solarises, and other NetBSDs.  There
are several servers available, but many systems were using the
NetBSD system as their server, which ypbind bound to by itself.

The problem I had was with the cron process on the HP clients
(I did not see any problems with any other clients):  it would
occasionally be trying to read the entire group file, and somehow
the server would get stuck in a loop, sending part of the group file over
and over again, never finishing.  In a 24-hour period, there could
be as many as 30 spawned-off ypserv processes sending these never-
ending group files, which would make the ypserver very very slow.
Compiling ypserv and libc with '-g' leads me to believe the problem
is within the db code, but I can't tell for sure.  I am unable to
do anything with cron (or anything else) to reproduce the problem.

I would have liked to have tried out NetBSD as a master instead of
a slave, but I believe that yppasswdd is unable to use any file as
the passwd master other than /etc/passwd.

-- Chuck