Nathan Moore said...

|Is there a way to share a hosts list via NIS?  Are there any advantages to
|this over DNS or /etc/hosts?  I'm running NIS, DNS, and home directory
|shares all off of one server (honker in the examples, 10.30.27.5)

Aha, I was right!  You are probably already sharing
the hosts file off honker.  Look and see if /etch/hosts
there or /var/yp/hosts (should be the former, but...)
contains an entry with honker as 127.0.0.1 or something
similar.  If so, break that into two lines, like this:

127.0.0.1		localhost.localdomain localhost
10.30.27.5		honker.whatever honker

Since I suspect you already are serving this file via
NIS, you could try adding a bogus host and IP to that
file and doing a make in /var/yp (wheberever) and
then trying a ping of the bogus host on an NIS client.
UIt should resolve, but not ping.

The problem with using NIS for host lookups is that
as far as I Know, NIS doesn't cache this.  The NIS
caching daemon (nscd) doesn't cache it, either.  Maybe
the resolver caches it even if it gets it through
NIS; I don't know.  I do know the resolved is supposed
to cache things looked up through DNS.

-Miles