How an NIS master is selected

If you enable the NIS slave on your storage system, the NIS servers listed with the nis.servers option are contacted to determine the master NIS server. The NIS master can be different from the servers that are listed with the nis.servers option. In such a case, the servers listed with the nis.servers option inform the slave about the master server.

The NIS slave on your storage system can contact the master only if any one the following conditions is true:

The NIS server must have an entry in the hosts map (or ipnodes map for IPv6) for the master.
The /etc/hosts file on your storage system must be able to resolve the IP address of the master.

Parent topic: How to use NIS to maintain host information