[torqueusers] Torque and NIS

[Stephen J. Scheck]

Just a few general comments about NIS ... even though you've got it 
working, this might help in the future.

Whenever you set up a NIS client on a new machine, it doesn't hurt to 
reboot the system. This is because lots of running processes will have
cached the state of the /etc/nsswitch.conf file before you added "nis";
in your case, pbs_mom did this. It will also happen with sshd and other 
persistent processes like that. You can go and restart everything 
manually, but a reboot will make sure you get everything.

Anthoer potential problem you might have with NIS is if you also have 
nscd running. nscd is the name service caching daemon, which caches the 
results of NIS lookups, so for example your NIS client doesn't have to 
make a network request everytime you do an "ls" and it needs to resolve 
a numeric UID/GID to a name. It does positive and negative caching, so 
if somehow nscd is running before you get NIS completely setup, and you 
test to see if a NIS user exists, it could get negatively cached and it 
will seem that the user doesn't exist when you expect it to. Useful 
commands in this case are:

/usr/sbin/nscd --invalidate passwd
/usr/sbin/nscd --invalidate group
/usr/sbin/nscd --invalidate shadow

This will flush all nscd caches and often solves a lot of NIS problems.

Hope this is helpful.

Cheers -sjs

Ashley Wright wrote:
> Thanks Chris,
> 
> I just needed to restart the pbs_mom! I did not even think of doing that.
> It is all working now, so thank-you,
> Ashley.
> 
> On Thu, 14 Jul 2005 03:13 pm, Ashley Wright wrote:
> 
>> bash-2.05b# id wright4
>> uid=1001(wright4) gid=100(users)
>> groups=100(users),501(systemadmin),503(itshpc)
>>
>> This is the first user account on the system.
> 
> 
> Very wierd - this is on Linux yes ?
> 
> The mom's have been restarted since YP was configured ?
> 
> cheers!
> Chris