SUMMARY: problems with NIS+ clients losing their master

Folks,
        This is a rather tardy summary of the problem I had.  I posted
this missive a while back:

>
>        I have a NIS+ network that is giving me some grief.  The
>master is a E220R, hooked up to a cisco switch - by the look of it the
>port is running 100 full-duplex without error.  The problem I have is
>over the past couple of days the NIS+ clients suddenly will not
>authenticate users.  When this happens a nisls on the client produces
>the error "error in rpc subsystem", the master seems to work fine at
>this time.  If I reboot the server then the clients can suddenly work
>ok again... until the next time.  I searched sunsolve and turned up a
>likely sounding solution which was to reinitialise the cachemgr
>databases but that did not work in this case.  A google search turned
>up a guy that had a similar sounding problem on a linux box which
>turned out to be a network problem, at the moment I cannot rule this
>out but I am still looking for other clues.  The server is a E220R
>running Solaris 2.6 plus a relatively recent patch cluster.  The
>clients are diskless 2.5.1 machines.
>

I only got one response, from Carl Ma who suggested the sun was not
liking talking to the cisco switch.  This was not the case here
though, the sun was working fine with the switch (the switch had it's
own problems with link flap but the NIS+ problem did not go away when
that was fixed).

I tried a few things.  One that seemed to work for a while was to get
root to do a keylogin but that seemed to fall apart after a while.  In
the end I refreshed root's credentials on the NIS+ master and most of
the machines got better.  One particularly stubborn machine had to be
re-added as a NIS+ client before it would cooperate.  Not very
satisfactory but the machines seem to be running ok for the moment.

-- 
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Brett Lymn, Computer Systems Administrator, BAE SYSTEMS
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