YP required with NFS?

[John Bruner]

I don't have any great love for YP (in fact, I really dislike it),
but a YP-like scheme can address some problems which symlinks
across remotely-mounted filesystems cannot.  In a large network
environment some files (e.g. the password file, the host table
if you don't use the name daemon, the mail aliases file) are so large
that a linear search of the ASCII file is too slow.  4.3BSD handles
this by creating dbm-format files that can be accessed quickly.  
However, these binary files cannot be used in a heterogenous
network environment (e.g. by both Suns and VAXes).  YP solves this
by creating dbm-format files and interposing an intermediate process
(the YP server) to access them.  Since YP is built upon RPC, multiple
non-identical machines have a uniform interface to the data.

BTW, has anyone noticed that the resolver library routines are absent
from Sun 3.2's libc.a?  All hostname lookups are supposed to go through
the YP server, which will contact the name daemon if it needs to.
Apparently Sun figured that noone would want to access the nameserver
directly (e.g. to obtain MX RR's).  (On our machines, I compiled the
resolver library from 4.3BSD and installed it as "libresolv.a".)
-- 
  John Bruner (S-1 Project, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory)
  MILNET: jdb at mordor.s1.gov		(415) 422-0758
  UUCP: ...!ucbvax!decwrl!mordor!jdb 	...!seismo!mordor!jdb