YP(NIS) server not reacheable

[Kenny McDonald]

I have a 4D240GTX running as the NIS master server (no secondary servers for
now).  My clients are a 4D25 PI and another 4D240GTX (which are on the
opposite side of a bridge than myself).  Today we ran into a problem with our
bridge and we lost communications between the clients and the server.  The PI's
passwd file had included NIS entries for all users but root, and the 240 had
all local passwd entries with the exception of a couple of users.  Our problem
is that when we lost communications, our NIS clients locked up.  No one could
log into them; we kept getting login timeout (no YP server).  We tried to
reboot our 240 and it was very,very,very slow in rebooting.  We did finally
get root logged in on the PI.  We created a local entry (on PI) for one
of our users that is also on the 240.  This user was able to log on to the PI,
but it was very slow in doing so, and wsh windows were slow in popping up.
Once the 240 rebooted the it was up, this user tried to rlogin to it.  But
no luck; we got the same message (no YP server).  Doesn't these systems use
the local ascii files if the NIS server is down, or do you have to kill the
ypbind process in order for this to occur?  Is there something I should do in
order to let it use the local files if there is something screwed up with NIS?

I am going to set up the other 240 today as a secondary server to do away with
this problem in the future.

Any comments/suggestions are welcomed on this topic.

Thanks.