On a network with a NIS master and several slave servers. If a linux client is bound to a NIS server and "ypserv" dies on that server, the linux client does not disconnect and try to find another NIS server. Eventhough there are several servers listed in our /etc/yp.conf. Eventually, one would have to restart "ypbind" : "/etc/rc.d/init.d/ypbind restart" to get things back to normal. If this happens on Solaris, the client rebinds to another server specified in the ypservers.
to achieve this behavior one needs to have a line like domain NISDOMAIN broadcast in the /etc/yp.conf. The timeout values are a bit high, at 30 seconds. In the next release ypbind will do this type of broadcasting by default (unless turned off by the site admin) and the ping/timeout time will be reduced from 30 sec to 10 sec. Fixed in the current devel tree (and will show up on rawhide at the end of this week).
This is definitely NOT what I would want it to do though! I don't want it to broadcast, I want it to go the next server I specified. As it stands now, it does the broadcast then lands on any old YP server it can find instead of the ones I specified in yp.conf. -Thom