Setting Up Fedora or RHEL as an NIS Slave Server

To set up an NIS slave server, you must configure it as you do an NIS master server, but with one exception: Instead of creating the NIS maps, you run the ypinit command so that the NIS maps can be copied from the server. The option that you give to ypinit is the -s master option, where master is replaced by the name of your NIS master server. Here is an example of running ypinit where the NIS master server is named maple :

 #  /usr/lib/yp/ypinit -s maple  

As long as the NIS slave server is allowed access, the maps should be copied to your computer from the NIS master server. If the NIS master server goes down, this slave computer should be able to handle NIS requests from the network.

At this point, you can return to the section on setting up NIS as a client to make sure that your NIS server is running properly and distributing the maps to its clients .