> The point here is just that a valid NIS domainname needn't be a valid
> hostname
I realize that's what the present text is saying; I was drawing
attention to what it *doesn't* say.
> - the expectation is that your network administrator will tell
> you what it is
On the other hand, it's always useful to say how the person installing
nis can find this out without having to ask someone else. Log into
the machine you'll be using as server, type nisdomainname. Done.
No waiting for a reply to e-mail.
Failing that, the documentation should at least say "Ask your network
administrator what it is if you don't know." The fact that network
administrators call simply refer to it as "the NIS domain name"
without further comment is no help to someone who *isn't* a network
administrator, so isn't familiar with the nomenclature, but wants to
install nis. Instructions on how to set something up should be
targetted at the people who don't already know how to do so !
> No, DNS shouldn't be required at all for NIS unless something in your
> configuration requires it (for example, using a hostname that isn't in
> /etc/hosts)
I specified the server as a numeric IP address.
So DNS *really* shouldn't have been needed.
But see below.
> Without knowing what other packages were installed it's a bit difficult
> to see what might have gone wrong - do you have that information?
The other packages uninstalled when I (just now) marked bind9-host as
no longer needed were libbind9-30, libdns32, libisc32, libisccc30,
libisccfg30, liblwres30. However, uninstalling this set of packages,
I do indeed find that nis restart works without them; so whatever was
happening, it wasn't bind after all. Fair enough, bind isn't needed.
And yet nis restart didn't work until I installed bind9-host !
Perhaps there was some communication problem on our network, that went
away at a confusing moment. Very strange.
Eddy.
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