NIS - "Could not read ypservers map" during "make"

[Tom Buskey]

ken at flyingtoasters.net wrote:
>>>2)  Is it running ypbind?
>>
>>  No.  My understanding is that ypbind is only run on NIS clients, no?
> 
> 
> No.  It's run on everything -- the server is, indeed, still a client
> (unless for some bizarre reason it was determined that even though it
> served the data, it didn't need to see it.  I've seen that once or twice
> for security reasons.)
> 
> This is almost certainly your issue.
> 

I was adminining a site that heavily used NIS.  There were 5 slave 
servers and one master.

Like all of the clients, they used NIS heavily as a client.  Everything 
was set up to bind to whatever NIS server responded 1st.  Good for 
clients when a server goes down and it does some load balancing.

Ok, one server crashed.  A reboot from a clean shutdown takes 30 minutes 
or so.  When it boots, it's usually too busy to serve NIS to itself, so 
it binds to another server, whichever responds quickest.

When NIS rebinds, it's on the order of minutes, an eternity in computer 
time.  While it rebinds, the load goes way up.  To 30-100 in uptime.

What happened was a domino effect.  On server went down.  Another server 
was bound to it and its load went up until it crashed, etc.

To fix it, I made all the YP slaves (and the master) bind to themselves.

Paul, do you remember that day?