System Administration Guide: Naming and Directory Services (DNS, NIS, and LDAP)
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NIS and the Service Management Facility

The NIS service is managed by the Service Management Facility. For an overview of SMF, refer to Chapter 16, Managing Services (Overview), in System Administration Guide: Basic Administration. Also refer to the svcadm(1M) and svcs(1) man pages for more details.

  • Administrative actions on this service, such as enabling, disabling, or restarting, can be performed by using the svcadm command. However, ypstart and ypstop can also be used from the command line to start or stop NIS. See the ypstart(1M) and ypstop(1M) man pages for more information.


    Tip - Temporarily disabling a service by using the -t option provides some protection for the service configuration. If the service is disabled with the -t option, the original settings would be restored for the service after a reboot. If the service is disabled without -t, the service will remain disabled after reboot.


  • The NIS Fault Managed Resource Identifiers (FMRIs) are svc:/network/nis/server:<instance> for the NIS server and svc:/network/nis/client:<instance> for the NIS client.

  • You can query the status of NIS by using the svcs command.

    • Examples of svcs command and output.

      # svcs network/nis/server
      STATE        STIME    FMRI
      online       Jan_10   svc:/network/nis/server:default
      # svcs \*nis\*
      STATE          STIME    FMRI
      disabled       12:39:18 svc:/network/rpc/nisplus:default
      disabled       12:39:18 svc:/network/nis/server:default
      disabled       12:39:20 svc:/network/nis/passwd:default
      disabled       12:39:20 svc:/network/nis/update:default
      disabled       12:39:20 svc:/network/nis/xfr:default
      online         12:42:16 svc:/network/nis/client:default
    • Example of svcs -l command and output.

      # svcs -l /network/nis/client
      fmri         svc:/network/nis/client:default
      enabled      true
      state        online
      next_state   none
      restarter    svc:/system/svc/restarter:default
      contract_id  99
      dependency   exclude_all/none svc:/network/nis/server (offline)
      dependency   require_all/none svc:/system/identity:domain (online)
      dependency   require_all/restart svc:/network/rpc/bind (online)
      dependency   require_all/none svc:/system/filesystem/minimal (online)
    • You can use the svccfg utility to get more detailed information about a service. See the svccfg(1M) man page.

    • You can check a daemon's presence by using the ps command.

      # ps -e | grep rpcbind
      daemon 100806      1   0   Sep 01 ?       25:28   /usr/sbin/rpcbind

      Note - Do not use the -f option with ps because this option attempts to translate user IDs to names, which causes more naming service lookups that might not succeed.


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