On Wed, Jan 07, 2015 at 03:21:37PM -0700, Stephen John Smoogen wrote:
> On 7 January 2015 at 14:54, Konstantin Olchanski <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> Hehe. I remember when 20 years ago people would say the exact same thing
> about ypbind over some sort of script set which copied everything with root
> rcp. Those then got replaced by people who had used ypbind somewhere and
> were comfortable on it.
> 

I started in this business in 1992 and our cluster of SGI machines
was already based on NIS (from before my time). (I think automount/autofs/amd
showed up a little later).

But believe it or not, I am seriously considering "going back" to scp-pushed
config files - too many technical problems have accumulated with NIS and with
the current software chain "nis maintainers"->Fedora->RHEL->SL I doubt they
will ever be fixed (even if "nis maintainers" still exist):

- ypbind vanished mysteriously (usually during periods of network connectivity loss)
- ypbind killed by OOM killer (kill something else, please!).
- autofs and rpc.mountd doing negative caching (after pushing new autofs and netgroup maps,
  these demons have to be restarted on each client machine, or they would not see
  the added entries).
- ypbind does not automatically open holes in the firewall (fixed in SL7?!?)
- hard to add non-standard autofs maps (have to edit the Makefile).
- probably more.

>
> My main concern is that most places I have seen that kept with ypbind get
> replaced with Active Directory (which FreeIPA is really trying to give an
> answer for).
> 

Not in the DAQ world - makes no sense to run a Windows Activer Directory box
just to manage a bunch of (effectively) embedded Linux machines. Plus DAQ
usually means unattended operation while Windows (and MacOS) has
too many "keyboard not found, please press F1 to continue" gems and generally
assume that there is a human lackey in front of the terminal at all times
ready to service any whim ("let's reboot now to install these important Windows updates!").

-- 
Konstantin Olchanski
Data Acquisition Systems: The Bytes Must Flow!
Email: olchansk-at-triumf-dot-ca
Snail mail: 4004 Wesbrook Mall, TRIUMF, Vancouver, B.C., V6T 2A3, Canada